From time to time I like to experiment and try small distros. The fact that there is so much PC hardware around that has been rendered useless because of Windows bloat (updates, anti-virus, firewall, ...) always reminds that we might have a very good use of those computers if we use them with some lighter version of software. I have a bunch of old PCs, some not that old, but still considered outdated for use with Windows.
I successfully run Linux on those "old, but not very old machines" and I use distros such as Ubuntu, PCLOS, CentOS, etc.
Small Distros
Whenever it comes to older PCs (P3 and older) I enjoyed experimenting with Puppy, DSL, TinyMe, Vector... and all those distros are great. Recently, I came across something called Crunchbang Linux 8.04. I did not see it on DistroWatch website. It is an unofficial Ubuntu based distro with OpenBox winfow manager.
CrunchBang 8.0.4.02
I played with it little bit on VMware, then I tried it on a 733MHz P3 with 384MB RAM. Since I use Ubuntu on all production machines in my company and at home as my first choice, I love the fact that CrunchBang uses Ubuntu repositories and is in fact Ubuntu. I even installed OpenOffice 3.0 that appears to be faster than 2.4 and was able to modify Start menu and other OpenBox shortcuts. OpenOffice ofcourse may not be the best choice for a very old and slow PC (please check Abiword).
I also installed Midnight Commander (my favorite console file manager). I like the fact that all the typically needed stuff is already there (truetype fonts, flash player, java). I love "dark theme" on CrunchBang and I have to admit that it makes a lot of sense for slower and older machines in Ubuntu environment.
It probably makes sense to use it on newer fast machines and enjoy the speed of a light non-bloated setup. However, for production machines I would still stick with something "official".Comments
Great work! Looking forward to possibly see CruncBang in DistroWatch. I definitively recommend everyone to try. Great thing is that all the support and resources available to Ubuntu users are applicable here.
Refrences
http://crunchbang.org/projects/linux/
http://distrowatch.com
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