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CrunchBang Linux 8.10CrunchBang Linux (#!) is a lightweight Ubuntu-based distribution featuring the OpenBox window manager and Conky system monitor. The distribution is essentially a minimal Ubuntu install with a custom set of installed packages, and it has been designed to offer a balance between speed and functionality. The light system requirements suggest that CrunchBang Linux is a perfect match for an outdated computer or a netbook. With this in mind, your author tested CrunchBang Linux 8.10.02 on an Acer Aspire One with a 8 GB SSD and 512 MB RAM. Since the RAM is on the low end, this puts to the test how lightweight CrunchBang Linux really is. Installing CrunchBang LinuxCrunchBang Linux comes in three editions: Standard Desktop Edition, Lite Edition, and CrunchEee Eee PC Edition. Your author opted for the Standard Desktop Edition. CrunchBang Linux, like its parent distribution, is available as a live cd image. Of course, the best performance is achieved when installing the distribution on the SSD or hard disk. Your author used Unetbootin to write the iso image to a USB pen drive and booted the live distribution. The installer (started by right-clicking on the desktop and choosing "Install") looks familiar: it is the well-known seven-step installer of Ubuntu's live cd. After the installation, the light system requirements immediately shine. CrunchBang Linux boots significantly faster than Ubuntu Intrepid on the Acer Aspire One and it feels much more responsive. The memory requirements are significantly less: while Ubuntu is eating almost all the available RAM right after booting, CrunchBang Linux needs only around 150 MB. Even after opening Firefox and some other applications, the memory usage of 250 MB is rather modest. Minimalistic desktop![[CrunchBang Screenshot]](/images/crunchbang_sm.png)
The first thing that one sees is the minimalistic interface. Instead of Ubuntu's brownish colors, CrunchBang Linux presents a stylish black background without icons, and showing some system information like CPU, RAM and disk usage. This is done by the Conky system monitor, which also shows some shortcut keys for opening a web browser, terminal, editor, etc. This is helpful for the novice user not yet acquainted with the shortcut keys. Conky is completely customizable: for example, it is possible to show weather reports on your desktop, email notifications, battery life, and more. The CrunchBang Linux forum hosts plenty of examples of the conkyrc configuration file. The OpenBox window manager is a program in the same minimalistic style. It has no menu bar, but right-clicking on a random position on the desktop presents a menu with applications, preferences and system settings. One caveat: when your author installed an application, it was not automatically added to the applications menu: he had to edit the OpenBox menu file manually. The bottom panel shows the virtual desktop pager, a window list, system tray, digital clock, wireless network, battery status and clipboard manager. Additional plugins are available if you need more information on your panel. Member of the Ubuntu familyAlthough CrunchBang Linux is an unofficial branch of Ubuntu, it stays close to the upstream distribution: it uses the official Ubuntu repositories and the same update manager and package management tools. It even uses the stock Ubuntu kernel. Hence, when you are facing problems, most of the information in Ubuntu wikis and forums still applies. CrunchBang Linux has also its own places for help (a wiki, forum, blog and planet aggregator) and an active and helpful IRC channel (#crunchbang on freenode). The standard set of installed applications differs a bit from Ubuntu's set. For example, CrunchBang Linux doesn't install OpenOffice.org, but the much lighter Abiword and Gnumeric. CrunchBang Linux is also a good fit for web-centric users: Firefox 3 is installed with out-of-the-box Flash support. Other installed internet applications are Skype and Gwibber (for Twitter users). CrunchBang Linux also has MP3 support and encrypted DVD playback out-of-the-box. If you use the Lite Edition, the difference mainly lies in the number of installed applications: the Lite Edition is even more minimal. The support for the Acer Aspire One is good: Your author successfully applied all the suggestions and tips from the Ubuntu community documentation for the machine right away in CrunchBang Linux. Using wired internet, he installed the linux-backports-modules-intrepid package for the ath5k wireless driver, and after a reboot wireless networking was fully functional. The tweaks for better SSD performance in the Ubuntu community documentation also work in CrunchBang Linux. ConclusionIf you are looking for an easy-to-use and lightweight Linux distribution, CrunchBang Linux should definitely be considered. The combination of the OpenBox window manager and Conky system monitor with an Ubuntu base and a carefully chosen set of lightweight applications makes it unique. With CrunchBang Linux, you can revive an updated computer or let your netbook shine. Moreover, the huge set of available Ubuntu documentation also applies for this distribution. This makes it easy for Ubuntu users to migrate to CrunchBang Linux, while still having the advantages of the huge Ubuntu community. (Log in to post comments)
CrunchBang Linux 8.10 Posted Feb 27, 2009 3:20 UTC (Fri) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]
150 megs, really?
I remember not too long ago using linux on my desktop with 128mb of ram. Aside from mozilla everything easily fit into the memory.
What's happened since then?
CrunchBang Linux 8.10 Posted Feb 27, 2009 3:27 UTC (Fri) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] Perhaps users have become less tolerant to slow computers.
Constant UI responsiveness Posted Feb 27, 2009 4:42 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] Perhaps users have become less tolerant to slow computers.Subjectively, the responsiveness of desktop operations has remained about the same, despite hugely growing memory and CPU power... As I noted in an earlier comment to a similar thread, back in around 1995 I used to run OS/2 Warp on a 75Mhz Pentium with 32MB, it was about as user-friendly as today's Linux desktops, and did not feel any slower. Unlike Windows at the time, OS/2 was a proper multitasking 32-bit OS, and its GUI was smarter. It really is a mystery where all that computing power disappears.
Constant UI responsiveness Posted Feb 27, 2009 7:22 UTC (Fri) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793) [Link]
Anti-aliased fonts, for starters..
Constant UI responsiveness Posted Feb 27, 2009 8:14 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] Anti-aliased fonts, for starters..OS/2 already had scalable fonts (Adobe's font manager), not sure how much antialiasing would add to that. It is true my old machine had a 8-bit-colour display and the resolution was 800x600, if I recall correctly. Compared to it, my current 24-bit, 1280x1024 pixel display needs about 10 times more memory for the display. Possibly many off-screen copies of images like icons etc. have with a similar ratio. But I don't think that alone would justify all of the increased RAM requirement.
Constant UI responsiveness Posted Feb 27, 2009 9:03 UTC (Fri) by farnz (guest, #17727) [Link] When doing your calculations, remember that anti-aliasing increases the number of pixel values to calculate, and adds a stage to reduce back down to the physical pixels. In a TV targeted font rendering system I worked with, the manufacturer estimated that they calculated 16 logical pixels for every physical pixel. Responsiveness has improved for me (although I've been buying more expensive machines over time), but I've also gone from 800x600x8bit (so just under 500kiB of frame buffer to fill) to 1440x900x32bit (so nearly 5MiB of frame buffer to fill), and switched on anti-aliasing, driving the new figure up to 40MiB of pixel data to calculate in the worst case, assuming the numbers from my past still apply. The big difference I've noticed is not responsiveness when idle (which has always been beyond my ability to measure), but responsiveness under load. Instead of having my machine grind to a halt for 30 seconds when I print a photo, or compile software, I get to continue working unaffected, and background tasks complete faster - this is a win/win for me.
Constant UI responsiveness Posted Feb 27, 2009 9:10 UTC (Fri) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793) [Link]
By being anti-aliased it means they have to "alpha-blend" the character bitmap with the background and foreground color, which is several times slower than the simple case they had to do before. I don't believe this was used on 8-bit color displays, as it would add a "dithering" step.
Scalable fonts just add a step in the generation of the characters, which can then be put in cache and only hurt performance the first time they are generated. And some scalable formats included pre-generated bitmaps for the common sizes. Windows would happily return a font of this already generated sizes, instead of generating a new one, if the size we wanted was close enough.
Anyway, just to point out one of the many things we now take for granted that are possible because we have the CPU power, and the memory, for it.
Constant UI responsiveness Posted Mar 1, 2009 5:56 UTC (Sun) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] Anti-aliased text would not really be needed much if the Linux font scaling would work better (like as well as in Windows 3.1). The big obstacle here is of course the infamous software patent that prevents FreeType from working as well as it could. Another is the quality of free fonts, until very recently.In the past, I found the display looking much better for me, if I recompiled FreeType with the "illegal" bits of code enabled, and then turned antialiasing off. Without this the letters would be irritatingly fuzzy. Lately I have not bothered, mainly because larger display resolutions make the antialiasing fuzz less offensive.
Constant UI responsiveness Posted Feb 27, 2009 10:40 UTC (Fri) by etienne_lorrain@yahoo.fr (guest, #38022) [Link]
Is there a way to disable Anti-aliased fonts completely?
Constant UI responsiveness Posted Feb 27, 2009 23:19 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Sure. In .fonts.conf:
<match target="font">
(And anyone who thinks this is a sane way to expose configuration state to
Constant UI responsiveness Posted Apr 7, 2013 12:24 UTC (Sun) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
In my KDE "fonts" control panel, there is a "turn off antialias altogether" item.
Constant UI responsiveness Posted Feb 27, 2009 10:50 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]
The Archimedes had anti-aliased, hinted outline fonts in 1989, and it was fast enough running on an 8MHz ARM chip. (Although the anti-aliased fonts were not used for dialogue boxes and widgets, but only for the contents of documents.)
Constant UI responsiveness Posted Feb 27, 2009 12:02 UTC (Fri) by k3ninho (subscriber, #50375) [Link]
And in 1994 the Acorn RiscPC had all its UI text displayed from outline fonts on a 30 or 33 MHz Arm610.
Constant UI responsiveness Posted Feb 27, 2009 13:18 UTC (Fri) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793) [Link]
Far from being an expert on the subject, but I would not be surprised if the RISC instruction set was the reason they could do it. After all they don't need SSE2/SSE3 instructions on RISC CPUs.
MMX instructions appeared on the Pentium Pro (don't remember the model) and on Pentiums at 166MHz (there was two versions, one without MMX). And MMX has that problem of sharing the floating point registers.
Multimedia instructions Posted Feb 27, 2009 16:21 UTC (Fri) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] The MMX and SSE stuff is about doing the same operation on several data in parallel (but working on small inputs, i.e., integers 8 bits wide). Some RISCy architectures have their own set of "multimedia" instructions.
Multimedia instructions Posted Feb 28, 2009 9:29 UTC (Sat) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793) [Link]
Sure, but alpha blending is just that.
By the nature of the RISC architecture, a lot of simple vector operations coded by hand would always outperform the same thing on earlier x86 CPUs, like the first Pentium.
I suppose there are more complex multimedia cases where it makes sense to have dedicated instructions equivalent to SSE on RISC machines.
Constant UI responsiveness Posted Feb 27, 2009 17:08 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
The reason they were able to do it was because they were dealing with limited color range and low resolution displays. It's not like they had much computing power left over to drive a Office suite or do any other form of multitasking.
That's all.
Try making that old Risc machine drive a modern LCD display with Alpha blending and see how far you get.
Constant UI responsiveness Posted Feb 27, 2009 12:05 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
I did a pile of benchmarking of font scrolling performance on the latest X server (now released as 1.6.0).
With the EXA glyph cache patch applied, AA and non-AA client-side fonts are nearly equivalent in performance, but there *is* a little CPU consumption from the X server which wasn't visible before, and peak scrolling speed (on my 1650x1050 widescreen, 1250MHz Athlon, Radeon 9250 AGP) is about half that of core fonts (where the fonts spray past in an utterly unreadable blur with no CPU consumption to speak of). Antialiased font rendering is actually about 5% *faster* than non-AA rendering, so I suspect the overhead of the actual antialiasing is drowned by other overheads (or perhaps it's just that antialiased rendering, as the common case, has been optimized more).
However, the difference between an utterly unreadable blur and a nearly unreadable blur isn't very significant to me: it still scrolls text off the top of the screen in a tiny fraction of a second.
(Without the EXA glyph cache, non-AA text in some cases can be hugely *slower* to render than AA text, and in both cases I was seeing >20s to scroll the screen up by a single line. But that's not AA overhead: that's transfers from VRAM, which are always going to be slow as treacle.)
Constant UI responsiveness Posted Feb 28, 2009 10:15 UTC (Sat) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793) [Link]
I'm using those mini-PC boards, like the VIA mini-ATX boards (and others, like the Geode based) to boot into a vesafb system for POS (Point of Sale) software.
The application uses FreeType to display anti-aliased text, but without any special optimization techniques other than brute caching and double-buffering. It works well, but can't afford to do much more without more complex optimization techniques (and then the best way would probably be to start using X).
The target machines range from Geodes with the power equivalent of a Pentium MMX@266MHz to modern Celerons @2GHz, so it's bearable enough on the Geode and instant on the Celeron.
I also can't afford to optimize the code for a specific machine, so it's just compiled with generic optimizations.
This POS machines are not always well tested. They are made to be compact and sometimes they don't have enough cooling space. For eye candy we have a screen-saver using alpha-blending to show a flashlight passing on the screen. Some lower end machines lock solid because they heat too much, so we limit that screen-saver to no more than a 5-minutes run.
CrunchBang Linux 8.10 Posted Feb 27, 2009 7:09 UTC (Fri) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]
The computer was perfectly responsive, when it wasn't swapping.
It only swapped when running mozilla, all other programs were fine.
I'm just wondering what the bloat statistics are that a "bare bones" system now uses around 120 megs, when back then (2002-ish), my system used around 30. I certainly understand that browsers are now required to be more complicated, and that desktop environments have gotten more .. featureful. But this includes neither. Is this the responsibility of hal? udev? Everyone?
CrunchBang Linux 8.10 Posted Feb 27, 2009 11:47 UTC (Fri) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link]
While a lot of that is due to size increases in userspace, there are overheads in managing the extra resources found in a system today (e.g. it takes more memory to manage 2GB of memory than it does to manage 64MB). Also, if you're using a 64-bit kernel certain structures now take up more memory too.
CrunchBang Linux 8.10 Posted Feb 27, 2009 12:07 UTC (Fri) by alankila (subscriber, #47141) [Link]
It's pretty much everyone. I think hal is relatively innocuous, and udev is very cheap, too. No, the problem appears to be with the GUI programs that make for instance the default GNOME desktop.
On my Ubuntu install, I can count about 5 GNOME programs that I could easily live without, that each use unique memory between 5 to 15 MB. (Whatever they are sharing might come for free, or with smaller cost, and it is difficult to estimate.)
For instance, a monster called update-notifier has 23 MB resident memory, of which only 10 MB is shared. I don't know what that program does that is worth at least 13 MB, given that most of the time it just lurks invisibly in the background.
mixer-applet2 that mostly shows a single volume icon has a 22M - 10M statistic giving 12 MB private memory use. fast-user-switching-applet is the same. Gnome power manager costs 8M (on a desktop system, too, where it's worthless). Hell, mere trash icon in panel costs 3 MB.
No matter how efficient you try to make any individual process, there's also the problem that a linux desktop today runs about 150 process, of which about full 50 come from kernel (and are probably cheap). The 100 userland processes necessary to service a single user each spend some resources for sure, but at least most of them use less than 1 MB of private RAM.
Funnily, the process that uses just above 1 MB of private RAM here happens to be hald, every other system process consumes less. And everything above that point is mostly gnome stuff...
CrunchBang Linux 8.10 Posted Feb 27, 2009 12:35 UTC (Fri) by alankila (subscriber, #47141) [Link]
Hmm. This bug may be about it: Pango might be culprit for wasting 6 MB per app:
http://www.nabble.com/pango-opentype---huge-memory-waste-(DejaVu-font)-td21599596.html
CrunchBang Linux 8.10 Posted Feb 27, 2009 15:32 UTC (Fri) by biged (subscriber, #50106) [Link]
interesting - the problem as reported, and patched, reduced system footprint from 200M to 130M - very significant.
http://www.nabble.com/pango-opentype---huge-memory-waste-...
CrunchBang Linux 8.10 Posted Feb 27, 2009 14:57 UTC (Fri) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]
From top output:
RES SHR COMMAND
Need more be said?
CrunchBang Linux 8.10 Posted Feb 27, 2009 15:17 UTC (Fri) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]
For comparision, the editor "joe" (with just one file, but it was twice as large as the total length of the three in gedit) had a resident size of 2M.
CrunchBang Linux 8.10 Posted Feb 27, 2009 16:14 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Much of xorg's RSS is going to be things like mmap()ed video memory: not relevant here.
CrunchBang Linux 8.10 Posted Feb 27, 2009 16:16 UTC (Fri) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]
Ah, I was wondering...
CrunchBang Linux 8.10 Posted Feb 27, 2009 23:22 UTC (Fri) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link]
Part of the problem is the explosion of storage-to-memory ratio. 15 years ago I had a computer with 20 times more storage than memory. Now I have a thousand times more storage than memory. It takes extra memory just to manage a filesystem that scales up to that size.
CrunchBang Linux 8.10 Posted Mar 3, 2009 18:41 UTC (Tue) by bockman (guest, #3650) [Link]
Developers don't optimize programs unless they have to. And they often trade speed with easy-of-coding, if they can.
So in exchange for less optimized programs you get more functionality and lesser bugs. At least, this is the theory :-)
P.S : I'm a developer - although not of OSS - so read the 'they' as 'us' :-)
CrunchBang Linux 8.10 Posted Feb 27, 2009 7:17 UTC (Fri) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
CrunchBang is very nice for smaller machines, I have it running well in a 200 MB for example. For those who don't like the black theme, and want a more GNOME/Windows like 'start/apps menu', this is fairly easy to achieve without config file hacking - there are some more typical themes available as part of the standard installation, and a widget you can install to create menus from the panel.
The CrunchBang community forums are also very helpful and friendly, as well as the Ubuntu community.
The biggest benefit of an Ubuntu-based light distro is the vast range of apps and good security updates - so you don't have to give these up even if you have a low-end machine.
Redistribution rights? Posted Feb 27, 2009 7:24 UTC (Fri) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link]
Could someone clarify, when again inclusion of Adobe Flash and Skype is touted, if these small distributions have actually redistribution rights of said software? AFAIK both programs do not have any kind of "redistribute at will" system (like proprietary Sun Java has, to an extent), meaning it's pretty much illegal / against the software licenses?
Of course, if it's somehow circumvented by downloading them on install or something like that, and even possible EULA shown, it's ok. But I feel quite a lot of these small distributions just install Google Earth & co. without giving any thought to whether it's allowed or not.
There is a reason why there is a difference between gratis and libre.
For old computers? Posted Feb 27, 2009 11:19 UTC (Fri) by saffroy (subscriber, #43999) [Link]
"The light system requirements suggest that CrunchBang Linux is a perfect match for an outdated computer or a netbook"
Or install a minimal Debian, use WindowMaker or Xfce and you're done (Lenny with wmaker runs perfectly on my 2001 600MHz laptop with 256MB RAM). I suspect you can do that with Ubuntu as well? Plus, you won't have to edit your window manager config file (it's so 90's!).
"Firefox 3 is installed with out-of-the-box Flash support"
Hmm how light is that? I think browser speed vs. modern day web sites is what drove my last voluntary desktop upgrade, and it will probably cause my next laptop upgrade (600MHz is getting a bit too slow for Firefox, sometimes I use h3v instead).
For old computers? Posted Feb 27, 2009 14:32 UTC (Fri) by pascal.martin (guest, #2995) [Link]
I have Debian Lenny, Gnome, running Firefox and the system monitor. Oracle XE is running in the background. In other words: a fat install indeed.
System memory used: 187.8 MB.
As other people, I am surprised this small install uses so much RAM. Would be interesting to see the list of processes...
For old computers? Posted Feb 27, 2009 16:47 UTC (Fri) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
You can certainly install a text-mode Ubuntu and add a WM on top (U-Lite is another light Ubuntu that packages this up a little), but it's a lot less newbie friendly than simply booting a Crunchbang Live CD, playing with it, and then installing to hard disk using the graphical Ubuntu installer.
The Crunchbang team deserve huge credit for delivering a light distro that is Ubuntu-based, meaning easy installation, easy security updates, and a huge library of apps, even on very old PCs.
For old computers? Posted Mar 2, 2009 11:08 UTC (Mon) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
Xfce hasn't actually been lightweight for years, unless it's improved recently (my only experience since around 2004/5 has been Xubuntu, which is a bit of a pig).
A while after version 4 came out I switched to KDE (probably around 3.2 then IIRC), and it was actually faster and lighter. Seriously. Of course KDE4 now uses about double the memory, so it's swings and roundabouts...
For old computers? Posted Mar 6, 2009 20:56 UTC (Fri) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link]
> Xfce hasn't actually been lightweight for years, unless it's improved
recently (my only experience since around 2004/5 has been Xubuntu, which is a bit of a pig).
When I last used Ubuntu, it's base system was pretty large. It had many
In Gnome desktop main memory usage (before you start any apps) seemed to
[1] UI app(let) memory overhead is surprisingly large. They load a huge
For old computers? Posted Mar 7, 2009 10:45 UTC (Sat) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]
I guess the resource thing is why the Plasma devs are integrating as much
as possible in plasma itself, like power and network management. But as you say, stability is the problem you get. More testing and QA is needed to get plasma to a reasonably stable state. In case of NM, this isn't a big issue - NM already IS a separate daemon, and having ANOTHER daemon to just show the interface is silly to begin with...
CrunchBang Linux 8.10 Posted Feb 28, 2009 8:34 UTC (Sat) by T-Virus (guest, #56889) [Link]
Why they are using an unstable Distribution like Ubuntu?
Why they don't take directly Debian GNU/Linux? Ubuntu based on Debian unstable too, so why they don't simply take Debian testing(more stable then Ubuntu Software and unstable tree Software of Debian)?
The only Thing that will bad on this idea is that there is non really new but stable Software in testing.
Martin
CrunchBang Linux 8.10 Posted Mar 5, 2009 10:29 UTC (Thu) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
Crunchbang have a version based on Ubuntu 8.04, which is stable and supported for 3 years on the desktop. I would guess they are using Ubuntu because it has some nice features for desktop systems meaning less work for the Crunchbang developers.
tested with 512mb and thats considered "low end" wtf?? Posted Mar 1, 2009 22:51 UTC (Sun) by gps (subscriber, #45638) [Link]
512mb is not low end, its ginormous!
tested with 512mb and thats considered "low end" wtf?? Posted Mar 8, 2009 20:39 UTC (Sun) by amikins (guest, #451) [Link]
In a modern environment, expectations of memory measured in whole gigs is commonplace. In fact, even baseline prebuilt machines are starting to come with 1 gigabyte of ram standard. "power user" rigs of 4 gigs are not unheard of, and some software/video/3d modelling developers are running around with 8 to 16.
Point of order, nowadays you can buy a two gigabyte stick of ram for $20 to $30.
So yes, by these standards, half a gigabyte is in fact "low end".
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