Wisen Tanasa | ceilfors

Ramblings and musings on software development

Another day, another distrohop

17 January 2014

Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Arch Linux, ArchBang, CrunchBang, and finally I did another distrohop to Debian. I don’t think I’m one of those proud distrohopper yet with this hop. Though my first few hops was quite intensive, CrunchBang has made me stayed for almost 6 months. I’m also not in a quest to find a perfect distro. What I really want now is just a stable enough distro. I need to balance getting things done and learning Linux. That’s what the hop is all about.

Before Debian

Before I switched to Debian, I was a happy user of CrunchBang. Great community, groovy speed and very lightweight. A fresh boot only consumes roughly about 200 mb of my RAM. As a matter of fact, I will use CrunchBang if I need other Linux machine. So why is the hop?

Living on the bleeding edge

I switched to Debian sid in CrunchBang to live on the bleeding edge. The more problems I fix, the more I have learned. Unfortunately some of them just couldn’t be fixed. Heck, or you can say that I had given up. I learnt a lot from the community in CrunchBang’s IRC, but this time the response is:

Are you using sid? You have to wait a little bit longer, son.

These are a couple of issues that annoyed me the most everyday:

  • After a couple of times resuming my machine from suspend mode, I will get a constant freeze every 1 or 2 seconds. I have to restart my machine to fix this. That’s means I can’t suspend my machine!
  • SLiM gives me issues too. After I logged in, Openbox is just not responding to me. Only my wallpaper is shown. Using a login-shell was the workaround. Therefore, my booting up ritual is: 1) Go to Virtual terminal, 2) login, and 3) startx. Ugh.

With those two of the above combined? A hop indeed. Some of the issues are happening because I did not RTFM properly too. I’m guessing that I did not apt-pin my packages properly. For my future self, read all of this next time!