Lately I’ve been thinking about installing a Linux distro on my thrusty but ailing netbook, a Samsung NC10¹. After some intense research via Google and countless hours of Youtube videos I found one particular distro I really liked: Crunchbang Linux. It’s quite a minimal distro but highly functional and it also looked quite nice to my eyes. It’s based on Debian which means that there’s a lot of apps for it and the support is generally good. I decided to download the current testing version, Waldorf, since I’m just going to use the netbook mainly for browsing and writing.

Installation

I wrote the iso to a USB stick and played around with for a few minutes before I hit install. I was a bit worried that I’d completely break my computer but the installation went fine. It took about 10-15 minutes and then the system was up and running. I was also prepared for some tinkering with the settings and such but everything worked right out the box, even the brightness and volume controls. Color me impressed!

Configuration

After the installation I decided to remove a couple of apps² since I’m not going to use them anyway. With a couple of sudo apt-get remove, sudo apt-get autoremove and some fiddling with the Openbox menu it was done in a matter of minutes. The default web browser, Iceweasel, wasn’t really for me so I replaced it with Chrome. I also change the default font in system montoring tool Conky to a monospaced one. I’m probably going to change a few more things, but so far I’m happy with the default experience.

Apps

While my goal is to keep the netbook as clean as possible there was one³ additional app that I just had to install: ReText. It was the only real Markdown editor with syntax highlighting that I could find. My favorite distraction free editor FocusWriter is available but since I want to keep my app count at a minimum I decided to only install ReText. I’ve heard that a Debian-compatible version of UberWriter is in the works so I might switch to that once it’s out.

Closing thoughts

In short I really love this distro. It’s fast, light on the resources, highly customizable but at the same just works. The battery life has gone down from around 5 hours to 4.5 hours, which isn’t that bad at all. In fact I’m really impressed by that too. I wholeheartedly recommend it to people who want to make the jump to Linux but don’t want to use something more resource-heavy, like the current main version of Ubuntu, while still maintaining an all-around functionality for most users.