Well, I tried to get Puppy Linux installed on my old Presario notebook PC as I wrote about recently, but I just couldn’t get the install to take.

Old Compaq Presario

For some reason we could not get the Grub boot loader to boot it up properly. No big deal, that gave me a good excuse to try another distro, and I’m glad I did!

CrunchBang Linux 8.10 is the distro that I was interested in trying on this old machine because it was advertised as being lightweight, and made for lesser machines. I tried the “Lite” version, that ran very well, so I the opted for the “Standard” version, and it’s been great ever since. It installed without a hitch.

CrunchBang is tightly based on Ubuntu with Openbox as the window manager, a much lighter-weight one than Ubuntu’s standard, Gnome.

CrunchBang Linux 8.10

It is also interesting looking because it makes use of Conky, which is a free software system monitor for the X Window System. and since it is prominently sitting on the desktop, it makes it seem easy to check it out and start to configure it, with all the examples out there it really isn’t that tough. CrunchBang ran great on that 192MB of RAM dinosaur with Firefox running (with the included Adobe Flash, by the way!), only bogging down when the Package Manager was also running.

All in all, whether or not your PC is old and worn out, CrunchBang Linux is a great player in Linux arena!

Related posts:

1. Running Linux on an old notebook