Wednesday, June 26, 2013

archbang live session

ArchBang, like Bridge Linux, starts you off with more than the minimal, non-GUI environment that you'll get with Arch Linux (from which ArchBang and Bridge are derived). Like Bridge, ArchBang uses the Arch repos. It includes the base Arch system, a functional desktop, and some scripts and configuration files.

A "real" Arch user might say, "If you want Arch, then install Arch." That's cool. But I appreciate having things set up a little bit for me. For now, I'll settle for being a "fake" Arch user as I check out Bridge and ArchBang.

With Bridge Linux, there's a choice of Xfce, GNOME, KDE, and LXDE/Openbox downloads. ArchBang, on the other hand, simply offers Openbox. I downloaded archbang-14.06.2013-i686.iso (only 397 MB!) and burned the image to a blank DVD (I had no blank CDs available). Here's what it looked like when I first booted into the live session:



A sample of what's included in the live session:

- Openbox, along with the Openbox menu, configuration manager, and other goodies
- the tint2 panel
- Compton, a compositor for X
- Firefox 21.0
- SpaceFM 0.8.7
- medit text editor
- LXTerminal
- Galculator
- GuCharMap, the GNOME character map app
- Pragha music player
- GPicView 0.2.3 image viewer (from LXDE)
- scrot, for screenshots
- the Parcellite clipboard manager
- HTop, the system-monitor process-viewer

No office suite, no games, not much in the way of multimedia stuff; just a handful of tools to get the user started. The Openbox menu is nicely set up and includes an "Install" option. The "Guide" menu option opens Firefox up to the "ArchBang Document," a guide at the ArchBang wiki.

Running the live session from the DVD I burned was obviously not going to be as snappy as running it from a flash drive; I'll try that before attempting an installation. Here are a couple more screenshots:




Some links:

http://archbang.org/
http://wiki.archbang.org/index.php?title=Main_Page
http://wiki.archbang.org/index.php?title=ArchBang_Document
http://openbox.org/wiki/Main_Page
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners%27_Guide

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