Out of the box, Cunchbang is a fairly minimalist desktop environment, using Openbox and Tint as the desktop and window manager.  A bit of tweaking to get menu sizes reduced and it takes up even less space on your desktop. Since vertical space is at a serious premium on this thing, the biggest challenges were getting Firefox and Thunderbird configured to make the most of the tiny screen.

On Firefox, I’m using Full Screen (not necessary in Firefox 3.6, of course), Tree Style Tabs and a combined menu and toolbar to clear up some pixels. Reduced font-sizes from the default make browsing more manageable even when I’m not in full screen mode.

Thunderbird 3.0 was a bit trickier. In the advanced preferences pane, under the config editor, set mail.tabs.autoHide to True to get rid of the tabstrip if there’s only one tab showing. I also found the header area in the message pane was taking up a lot of room, so I installed the Compact Headers extension to take care of those. You will need to disable compatibility checking through Nightly Tester Tools or the config editor to get it to work with Tbird 3. (Thanks to wswmk in irc for the tips!)

Whether I could live with this as my main portable is another matter. The trackpad on the thing is pretty poor, requiring a really light touch to tap-to-click. There are no real buttons on it, but the two bottom corners act as left and right mouse clicks if you press the trackpad down — it clicks. Because the pad itself is so sensitive, this invariably moves the pointer off of your target and you’ll get a misclick. Even more amusing is the right-side scroll wheel. If you’re on the desktop in Crunchbang, this is interpreted as a “jump to workspace” action, randomly skipping you through your desktops. It took me awhile to realize I was doing this accidentally and that it was a feature.

Other interactions between OS and hardware are pretty good. With the exception of networking. Connecting to a wireless network is a bit of a crapshoot. I can connect at home on a wirless G network with WPA2 passphrase, but it takes too long to negotiate initially. I could not connect to my parents’ network after multiple attempts and they have a basic WEP passkey. I installed wicd as my default network manager after failing with Network Manager and it seems a little better, but still slow.

In short, networking in Linux still kind of sucks.

But sound works! And the included A/V apps in Crunchbang are decent if not awesome. VLC works really well and after struggling with SMB to get network shares working, I can even stream stuff off of my fileserver. Also includes Rhythmbox and Audacity among other open source audio-video apps. No Songbird though?

Overall, it’s a fun little machine to hack around on. Screen’s probably too small to do any development, but works just fine as a little internet toy or writing machine. That it’s entirely an opensource software stack helps too. I wrote this post on it, and genuinely like the keyboard (after flipping the Caps Lock and CTRL keys). It sure is portable.