I have released a couple of new images for my CrunchBang Linux project. This new release brings CrunchBang Linux up-to-date with packages available from the 8.04.01 point release of Ubuntu. The new images have been completely rebuilt from scratch and feature a whole bunch of changes.

What's new?

• As stated above, all packages from the Ubuntu repositories have been updated to bring them in-line with Ubuntu 8.04.01. Most notably, Firefox 3 is no-longer beta software and a couple of well-known security vulnerabilities have been patched.

• Openbox has been updated to the latest version. See Openbox:Changelog for more information.

• An alternative XFCE4 desktop environment is available from the GDM login screen. It has been set-up to behave identically [well, near enough] to the default Openbox session. e.g. right-click menus, shortcut keys etc. This new feature is currently being guinea pigged by Becky the Linux user.

• Both the Openbox and XFCE4 sessions use the XFCE4 Settings Manager. This adds some overhead to the Openbox session, but also provides a solution to the problem of gnome-settings-daemon overriding users settings when invoked by accident — there are a surprising number of applications which invoke gnome-settings-daemon for no obvious reason.

• ROX-Filer has been replaced by Thunar as the default file manager; the thunar-volman package now handles auto mounting of devices. This is a huge improvement over the previous release, which used Ivman.

• A new "Lite" image has been made available. This image features the same Openbox and XFCE4 environments, but does not have the plethora of applications available in the full image. Hopefully, this new image will go a long way to satisfying requests to remove applications. The Lite image comes in at approximately 403M, making it significantly smaller than the standard image at approximately 633M.

• An alternative installation method. CrunchBang Linux can now be built from a minimal "CLI" installation of Ubuntu.

• Numerous other tweaks and changes, including but not limited to:

  • A new Usplash theme.
  • New GDM theme.
  • Xarchiver replaced by File Roller.
  • GnomeBaker removed in favour of Brasero.
  • Terminator now set as the default terminal emulator.
  • RealPlayer plugins enabled by default.
  • OSMO replaced by Orage.
  • Et cetera.

Download locations

As always, CrunchBang Linux has been developed for my personal use; however, everyone is free to download and use as they see fit. If you do decide to download, please pay special attention to the disclaimer, which basically states, "if you brick your system, do not come running to me."

For download locations, see: CrunchBang Linux 8.04.02 Download Locations. For the alternative installation instructions, see: CrunchBang Linux 8.04.02 Alternative Installation.

Screenshots

Some screenshots of CrunchBang Linux 8.04.02 in action, click on the thumbnails for larger images.

Tags: crunchbanglinux, openbox, projects, ubuntu, xfce4