3 week project – part 5 – #!CrunchBang

About two days ago I installed CrunchBang Linux and I am pretty much amazed. I haven’t really investigated why yet, but it runs SO fast. By that I mean considerably faster than anything else I’ve tried on this computer.

CrunchBang has conky running by default, which is a nice touch and also means that I can keep watching how stuff pulls on system resources as it goes. Generally speaking the processors average at about 5% each… which is nothing(!) and means that it responds very quickly when told to run a program. My RAM seems to sit at around 100-200 MB, which helps too. I guess that’s because there’s no hefty desktop environment running and eating resources. The desktop running by default is based around Openbox, and uses the file manager, panel and theme switcher from LXDE.

I haven’t had any crashes (yet) and I’ve updated the xorg-video-intel package as mentioned in part 4. I’m going to update the rest of the system tonight, so I’ll post again if that screws anything up. Webcam is up and running with a quick compile of the development driver.

Back on the subject of speed, boot time is down to 45 seconds from off to desktop. This isn’t outstanding, but it’s a full 15 seconds quicker than when I was using Fedora 10. Further advantages of this low memory and processor footprint are that the fan isn’t working half as hard as it was before, battery life is improved by about 20 minutes and Virtual Machines appear to be running a fair bit snappier, which are all really nice things.

The only thing left for me to comment on is the keyboard shortcuts. 10 minutes is and I was thinking “how did I ever use a computer without them?!”. I know, it sounds stupid… but the desktop is all rigged with two-button shortcuts for frequently used programs, screenshots and even system update. This is one of those things that I really could do myself but never would have spent the time doing…

Crunch, Bang, Brilliant.