Distributions
CrunchBang Linux exits the stage
On February 6, CrunchBang Linux founder Philip Newborough announced that he would halt development of the distribution. The reason for the decision, he said, was that the landscape of Linux distributions has changed considerably over the years, and in the current climate, there was no longer a need for CrunchBang. In the long term, of course, distributions (like other free-software projects) come and go, but this announcement was still a sad one for many in the community.
Newborough posted the shutdown announcement on the CrunchBang forum, thanking his wife and the CrunchBang community for their years of support. Regarding the decision to stop development, his comments were brief:
Newborough did say that the CrunchBang forums will remain online, and that he is happy to support them for as long as is necessary. The response from the forum users was swift and sizable; 14 pages (and counting) of messages followed, with almost all expressing a combination of disappointment at the loss of CrunchBang and gratitude to Newborough for his years of coordinating the project.
For those who are unfamiliar with its history, CrunchBang was started in 2008, when netbooks like the Eee PC were first hitting the store shelves. Those machines were notorious for their lack of processing power and memory in comparison with contemporary desktop hardware. The distinction between "low resource" and "standard" hardware specs has become far more blurry in recent years, but when the netbook craze started, it necessitated taking a different approach to provide a usable, responsive desktop environment.
CrunchBang was one of those projects that took such an approach. It bundled Debian with the lightweight Openbox window manager. Openbox is one of several stacking window managers for X, one that can run with significantly less GPU power by omitting window compositing and other graphical enhancements. There have been numerous other "lightweight" desktop distributions over the years, but CrunchBang fans consistently praised the work that went into integrating Openbox with other features so that it serves as a modern environment—and not just a generic package with minimal features. CrunchBang's desktop and GUI themes have always been regarded as well-made, with attention paid to the details, and the project provided a set of well-tested Python scripts to replicate the "modern" features implemented in more heavyweight window managers or desktop shells.
Nevertheless, since 2008 there has been no shortage of "lightweight" desktop distributions available. Another change in recent years is that the Debian community now actively supports Openbox and several other lightweight desktop environments and window managers (e.g., Xfce and FluxBox), making it comparatively simple to set up a CrunchBang-like system.
Still, there is a significant difference between the ability to install and configure Openbox and the ability to boot into a ready-to-use CrunchBang system. Consequently, not everyone on the forum concurred with the notion that vanilla Debian was a suitable CrunchBang alternative. Forum commenters brought up several other potential replacements, such as antiX and Semplice. Both are Debian-based distributions that focus on lightweight window managers—although neither uses OpenBox.
Forum user pvsage announced an effort to explore resurrecting CrunchBang under a new name (initially "Sparkle Dancer" but, more recently, "Debarchery"). Newborough responded to that idea with his encouragement. Users interested in the idea have since started a separate discussion thread on the CrunchBang forum to discuss it. So far, though, progress on a revived distribution remains in the planning stages.
Even if switching to a new distribution (be it pvsage's replacement or an unrelated lightweight distribution) is eventually necessary, the other lingering question is what existing CrunchBang users need to do in order to keep their systems running and up-to-date. Forum user iMBeCil responded that there were plenty of CrunchBang users who would still benefit from seeing the next planned CrunchBang release, tentatively named Janice, actually delivered.
At present, it seems that the Janice release has simply been scrapped altogether, which could understandably be a source of anxiety for users. More than a few forum members asked about the possibility of the community raising funds to underwrite continued development—and, evidently, one forum member even went so far as to set up a fundraising site, although forum moderators subsequently removed the post.
The good news is that the current CrunchBang release, Waldorf, should
continue to work
with the Debian wheezy repositories for the foreseeable future. And, as
forum user tknomanzr commented, adapting Waldorf to work with the Debian jessie repositories works as
well, with only "a few hitches
" concerning GTK+ themes.
There is also a guide
available that details the steps to update a Waldorf system to run on
top of Debian unstable.
Whenever jessie is released, Debian wheezy will become the oldstable distribution, at which point it will continue to receive backported security updates until the debut of the Debian stable release after jessie. That will add up to a significant amount of time, so the CrunchBang community will not be left in a vulnerable position any time soon.
Still, it is always sad to see a distribution close its virtual doors, and CrunchBang was always a distribution that drew praise for its merits, not on glitz or on dubious claims about performance or style. In short, Newborough and CrunchBang earned fans by executing well. There may yet be a future for many of the ideas that made CrunchBang useful for its user base, but measuring up to CrunchBang's reputation isn't trivial.
Brief items
Distribution quote of the week
My personal favorite is Fedora, because it is powerful and stable, while offering frequent updates to various packages and the actual kernel too.
The end of CrunchBang Linux
The developer of the CrunchBang Linux distribution has announced that the project has come to an end. "That said, when progress happens, some things get left behind, and for me, CrunchBang is something that I need to leave behind. I’m leaving it behind because I honestly believe that it no longer holds any value, and whilst I could hold on to it for sentimental reasons, I don’t believe that would be in the best interest of its users, who would benefit from using vanilla Debian."
Distribution News
Debian GNU/Linux
New Debian security mirror for Asia
The Debian Project has announced a new security.debian.org mirror with hardware and hosting provided by SAKURA Internet, Inc. The new host is located in and serves content from Japan. "The hardware and hosting donation will allow the Debian Systems Administration (DSA) team to improve Debian's core services by providing a security mirror archive for Asia and is another step towards decentralized and stable security mirror access for world."
Bits from the NM process
In the latest bits from the Debian Application Manager team (DAM) Enrico Zini details some changes in the New Member (NM) process. "We realised we were losing lots of energy by letting new DDs wait 6 months before allowing them to become AM. At the same time we are requiring previous Debian experience before becoming DD, which makes the second waiting period mostly redundant, so we lifted it: now any DD can become Application Manager as soon as they like."
Project Secretary appointment
Debian Project Leader Lucas Nussbaum has announced the (re-)appointment of Kurt Roeckx as Project Secretary.
Newsletters and articles of interest
Distribution newsletters
- DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 596 (February 9)
- Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 403 (February 8)
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Here's an extensive review of Samsung's first Tizen-based phone on ars technica. They are not overly impressed. "New OSes always have problems, usually with app selection and hardware availability, but they're supposed to make up for their ecosystem problems by bringing something new to the table. Windows Phone had a new interface style. Blackberry 10 devices have a small but vocal built-in fanbase, well-made hardware with physical keyboards, and lots of enterprise experience. But Tizen doesn't have any stand-out aspect. It's all the negatives of a new OS without any of the positives."
GCC 5 in Fedora (Red Hat developer blog)
Last week the Red Hat developer blog looked at some changes coming with GCC5. This week's article covers how those changes will be handled in Fedora. "One consequence of this decision will be that Fedora 22 and Fedora 23 will both have GCC 5, but they’ll be fundamentally different. The C++ library (libstdc++.so) will be compatible between F22 and F23 (in fact, it will be almost exactly the same, modulo some extra patches from upstream that might be pulled into the later F23 build). The difference will be all the other DSOs that link to it. That’s important for Fedora developers to note. Specifically, FESCo’s decision means the C++ standard library headers installed by the libstdc++-devel RPM will have a different default value for the _GLIBCXX_USE_CXX11_ABI macro (0 in F22 and 1 in F23) but the libstdc++.so library will be largely the same in F22 and F23, because that library contains all the symbol definitions for both the old ABI and the new ABI, so that the same library works for both cases."
Fed up with systemd and Linux? Why not try PC-BSD? (ITWire)
Sam Varghese talks with PC-BSD developer Kris Moore, in this article on ITWire. "Moore said initially there should be an understanding of what PC-BSD actually was. "First of all, I'm going to reference PC-BSD a lot here, but you need to understand that PC-BSD isn't a fork per se, it's just vanilla FreeBSD kernel/world with some unique installation options and a slew of graphical or command-line utilities to make FreeBSD on the desktop 'easy'," he said. "So pretty much everything I mention can be done from an official FreeBSD install, but would require a lot more manual effort."
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