No degree of hopping from one linux distro to another seems to satitate my wanderlust. I want to be a Linux nomad all my life, knowing well that sooner or later I will find my way to something clever, more interesting and deceptively simple.
After being a faithful Linux Mint Mate user for quite some time, I saw myself moving to something new. And so while searching for something interesting I stumbled upon BunsenLabs. It was a resurrection of my long time fav Crunchbang and though I was aware that after the demise of Crunchbang few worthy successors were waking up to the challenge to keep the uber light, minimalist distro alive, it was only now that I cared to go back and read about them. Crunchbang++ and BunsenLabs were two interesting projects and after a quick look around I decided to go with BunsenLabs.
I had go through the installation process twice, thanks to my own wrong doings, but I had the opportunity to use the cli installer as well as the graphical installer. I noticed that the cli installer is noticably slower than the graphical one. But the installation went smooth and in some time I was logged into the familiar openbox environment. Bland as usual. But I knew what I was signing up for. BunsenLabs is true to the minimalist approach. All you see is a bare minimum desktop with a BunsenLabs wallpaper, a neat conky on the right and thats all. What impressed me is the resource utilization reported by conky. At idle, it was barely touching 125MB of RAM usage, CPU usage also hovered at just about 1%.
Now was the time to look around for installed software. The menu is accessible via right click and is neatly categorized which helps look for the required applications. The most commonly used apps like the terminal, web browser, file manager, text editor are available on the top of the menu. Under each application category, apart from the installed list, BunsenLabs has managed to provide nifty scripts which allow to install additional software in one simple click. I quickly checked my options and installed LibreOffice Writer and Calc, Gimp, Vlc, Transmission etc to have my list of daily use softwares complete. It made me wonder shouldn’t these be already available in the distro rather than having to install them separately. But its better this way since the bare installation is minimal and one can customize it the way he wants. Gone are the days when having full installable iso distributions were needed for offline installation. With better broadband connections, its way simpler to have hand picked the apps that are installed in the distro. BunsenLabs just gives a plain canvas to paint whatever picture you can think of. Based off debian, it provides the stability and security and most applications can be quickly and effortlessly installed to make it a more complete, practical and useful Linux distro.
This time around I spend some time trying to configure the menu.xml. This file is what renders the complete menu invoked on the right click. It is easy to add more options, shortcuts etc to this configuration and make the menu easy to use. I added vlc as a quick shortcut, changed my default editor to sublime etc. These changes helped me understand the menu xml configuration better and now I am more comfortable making these changes. For those dreading the xml file changes, the same config is available via ui using the “GUI Menu Editor” under preferences.
I am not dwelling into the cosmetic changes, since setting the icons, themes and wallpapers is really a personal choice and I have already written quite a lot about these in previous posts. Over time I have come to settle for same set of themes, icons etc and so I quickly drop in the files under .themes or .icons, configure them as appropriate and get going with the cosmetic changes. I no longer seem to bother myself with how fancy my setup looks. Been focusing on simplicity, functionality and productivity off late. If all I care about, is getting the job done, then fancy UI should really be the least of my concern. For this same reason I was mulling over use of Manjaro i3. But lets keep it for later.
With few quick tweaks and installations I am onto my brand new BunsenLabs setup ready to take on daily computing in a new stride. Help is easily available. Online forums give enough information to get started in the right direction.
With BunsenLabs, I am transported back to my Crunchbang days which I absolutely loved. The amount of tinkering that can be done and ease of use make it stand out. Needless to say, the less resource hungry it is, the happier my laptop will be. That thing has been around for almost a decade and lightweight distros are all that it can handle. I am happy that 32-bit iso are still around and being maintained by some distros. BunsenLabs fits the bill perfectly. Let me take it for a ride and hope to stick to it for longer. Manjaro i3 is already the next big thing for me. But BunsenLabs will stay for a while now.
Leisure Linux 