alternative to crunchbang
 

I am helping a friend with his notebook. This thing takes a lot of abuse and is kind of beat up. He has windows 7 on it know, but it is very slow. The reason it is slow is because windows likes to use at least a gig of ram and that is all that is on this notebook. It is a samsung n210. I was surfing around the net looking for a good light weight user friendly OS. I stumbled onto distrowatcher's site and found one that looked like crunchbang, but user friendly and super customizable. Unfortunately I cannot recall the OS's name. So my question is what are some names of OS's that are like crunchbang?
Does the OS have to be like crunchbang for a reason? Good question, the answer is yes. The top most of the screen is damaged. The top left corner of the screen is also damaged. He needs to be able to open a menu anywhere on the screen, so that he can access programs and files.
Thank you
Jonnynitro138

AntiX and Semplice are a couple that come to mind.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...1/#post5286509

All my shots are done on Window Managers that allow the menu to appear anywhere on the desktop.

I also run Salix on my 9" Netbook. The Fluxbox edition. They have a Open Box edition also.

Is there any particular reason you don't want to use CrunchBang itself?

There is also:

SparkyLinux: Openbox version (based on Debian Testing)
http://sparkylinux.org/download/

WattOS: microwatt 8.0 (based on Debian Stable, like #! -- almost a clone, in fact)
http://www.planetwatt.com/pages/downloads

ViperR: Very similar (based on Fedora)
http://viperr.org/indexen.html

Of these, only microwatt 8.0 will offer the same stability as #! -- the others trade stability for a "fresher" package base and greater compatibility with newer hardware.

Yes the problem I have with crunchbang for new linux users is the menu itself. Say you install vlc through synapics or the terminal. Where is it? It isn't in the menu. It's gone, like it was never installed. Not really true, but a pain to have to try and work out if you never have used linux before. I looked at bodhi, but it doesn't recognize all of the hardware, mainly the wifi.

Use the supplied menu editor -- open a terminal & type `obmenu` ;)

This will probably be necessary with the #!-clones as well -- they all use openbox.

If you really don't like this, install lxpanel and edit ~/.config/openbox/autostart and change "tint2" to "lxpanel" -- this will give you a panel with a standard "kicker" menu that auto-updates.

Or change "tint2" to "xfce4-panel" -- this is already included in a standard #! install (it is a dependency of xfce4-power-manager).

Archbang?

antix with fluxbox will look a lot like crunchbang, and the menu has an update script to run after you install new packages. both are debian based, so package management is the same.

Yeah -- I see where this could be a problem for someone new to Linux, but once the guy learns to use obmenu, this problem's solved, I would think. Put obmenu in his Openbox menu so he doesn't even need to open a terminal to use it, maybe.

Then, maybe an Xfce distro with the panel at the bottom of the screen? Actually, I have my Xfce panel along the left side, but the applications menu icon is at the bottom left. But with Xfce, I can still get to the applications menu by right-clicking anywhere on the screen.

It's already there -- I think it's under "Settings → Openbox → Graphical menu editor" (haven't used #! for a while).

I had similar issue just few days ago: cheap laptop with Celeron CPU and 1Gb of RAM only. Tried a lot of distros and eventually installed crunchbang. Regarding menu openbox can launch main menu without clicking at panels: hot keys Meta+Space launches it. It may be usefull if your screen damaged at top or bottom and panels not visible. Menu will appear at current mouse pointer location. And it's enough easy to customize menu through "Graphical menu editor" as mentioned above.

AntiX - while #! is good, it uses more disk space than AntiX, (they use about the same amount of ram).

(I suggest you try AntiX full or base.)

Thank you all
 

Thank you all for your support in looking for crunchbang alternatives. My quest has come to end this day; because, of the holiday. My friend received a new laptop as a Christmas gift. :) So I am no longer trying to keep his broken one stitched together.
Thank you
Jonnynitro138
I did like and was planning on installing antiX-13.2 not 14 on the notebook.