Has anyone else tried this little debian distro? It's great! I've got a netbook with only 1GB ram, so having something with a small impact on memory is great.


With xchat, chromium, and terminal open, as well as conky running. 177 mb used, 820 free, and 0 swap used!

There is something for ubuntu that lets you rotate the trackpad (since I'm on a netbook) and was incredibly useful. The person who wrote the patch has a package available to just install for ubuntu, but that won't work for debian, and thus won't work for #!. So I had to grab the source for the unpatched package, but apt-get source wouldn't work. So I browsed through and found it manually, unpacked it, and patched it. And then rebuilt it and put it in place. Restarted X, and tah-dah! It only took me 3 hours to figure out what I was doing wrong, what I should be doing, and doing it. I know better for next time though.

Anyway, just wondering if anyone's ever used #!. Definitely keeping it on my netbook.

I've tried shabang (is the #! symbol) distros before. I really enjoy them, but prefer Fedora or an older Ubuntu distribution for daily use.

Ah, the Ubuntu Linux. I like the Kubuntu version of it more though.

I have tried it, but I actually have Mint 11 installed on my netbook, which works very nicely too. I also have used that patch to rotate the track pad, but it actually worked on Mint - of course that's essentially the same as Ubuntu... Been thinking about switching to an XFCE desktop though - I really don't like the new direction Ubuntu and Gnome are taking. I hear Enlightenment is good though...

Ubuntu and Gnome are touching on the reasons Linux never became commercially used: ease of use by non-tech people. I love Linux. Mac users will inevitably hate of more than windows for exaggerated versions of the same reasons.

I used a stripped down Ubuntu server plus KDE set up for years before switching to Debian plus XFCE earlier this year. Only thing I miss about KDE is that Dolphin built in renamer was simpler to use, but Thunar's renaming tool is much more powerful.

Never tried it, but I used Arch Linux for a long time and am currently using Trisquel.
Is it a good distro? I want a rolling release system but not something as minimalist as Arch.



I tried enlightenment for a day or two, and I must say it is quite strange. Xfce with Compiz is epic.

I'm a Gentoo user to the bone. I'm a bit of a Linux snob so I want everything just right and only Gentoo gives you the flexibility to make everything right.

For those of you not familiar with Gentoo, you compile everything from source (which is made easy due to a package manager called "Portage" and the ebuild system). Than means you don't have anything unless you put it there.

Not tried Crunchbang (#!). Tried several others before settling on Ubuntu. Until Unity came along that is. Now I use Kubuntu. KDE seems second nature to me now.

Oh, really? I've tried installing it twice and failed both times. One time the kernel compilation failed and the other time I had trouble with my bootloader configuration and I couldn't get it to see gentoo on the other partition. I think I still have that partition if I ever wanted to try again. I'm not sure that I'd be able to handle the long compilation times, especially now that school is starting; Linux configuration already takes up most of my time on the computer. It's fun though.

I've also used Sabayon which is Gentoo based and I kind of liked it, but it ran ridiculously slow with KDE so I gave up on that. It seemed to take the point out of being able to compile from source.

My first time installing Gentoo took me a full week. This was probably 4 full days of compiling intermixed in another 3 full days of troubleshooting, reading, and trial and error. Now that I understand the ins and outs of how Linux works I'm very comfortable with it but it took me a long time to get there. I have been regularly compiling the kernel since 2.6.9 so now I'm pretty comfortable starting with a blank config and getting it working on new hardware. lspci / lshw / lsusb and sysfs are your friends for getting the kernel working right.

But, I don't recommend Gentoo to others. It only works well for you if you put a ton of work into it. If you just want to use a computer without pouring blood, sweat, and tears into it then go with Ubuntu or some other distro.

I've always been confused about the actual advantages of Gentoo. I know it lets you have much more control over your system configuration and that sort of thing, but I've found that other distributions can do that as well. Does compiling packages actually give you better results then using the vanilla binaries that, for example, Arch or Slackware give you? I can imagine some advantages such as speed and disk space, but is that worth the extra time? I'm still trying to find a distro that perfectly fits my needs, and I can very well see it being Gentoo, but I'm a bit confused and intimidated by it at the moment.

Unity was gross. That's what turned me away from Ubuntu 11.04. Found #!, don't think I'm going back.

OK, I decided to give it (#!) a try. The CD is almost done burning. Wish me luck!

It's easy as pie and everything works out of the box. If you have any problems, check out the forums.


What my conky looks like right now, except I fixed the fonts being mismatched.

Fixed the Volume bar. Much better now, shows left and right channel.

Ah, well, I tried #! and kinda liked it, but I remembered that there was an Arch Linux version that uses Openbox called ArchBang, so I gave that a shot and am happy with it. You should try it out if you ever get sick of Debian distros

<3 set up tethering on my cellphone and #!, now I have internet wherever I go.

New desktop and terminal, too

<3 I made a QR code for #!.