Well, I was getting tired of things loading very slow on my 256MB Gateway M210S with Windows XP. (If you don’t know, I’m using this laptop because my Bios went corrupt on my main PC.) What did I do about it? I installed a light weight distribution called CrunchBang. It’s based off of Ubuntu. Installing it wasn’t the hard part.

All my issues getting CrunchBang up and running correctly.. Maybe this will  help someone?

I ran into some issues with my Ethernet controller and my sound card! Those two things did not work at all out of the box. I searched around for my prism wireless card and was able to get online. I found what the model number the problematic hardware was via lspci. I found it was the BCM4401. Then I tried to enable the module via modprobe b44. It gave me errors. I searched around for the answer to this on the Ubuntu forums, and found it was related to my Kernel version, or possibly an installed package. Anyway, I removed that certain package, because I didn’t need it for my Wifi which doesn’t need any special drivers.

Eventually what I did was edit the sources.list file in /etc/apt and removed all the commented out lines did sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade. Restarted, wow ethernet works.

Next issue: SOUND! ICH4 – Intel 82801DB-ICH4 did not work at all! Went through the guides to get audio working, checked alsamixer to see if anything was muted or something weird. Apparently it’s related to external amplifier and all the switches. You can enable external amplifier in Alsa, and then go into your sound controller and uncheck all the switches. It works.

So, now everything works. Yay. Now I have a laptop that is 15X faster booting up and running applications. Worth the trouble? I think so. Maybe others wouldn’t. It took some time to get all the bugs fixed. I have gotten too used to Linux working out of the box, but with older laptop components, it doesn’t seem like that’s the way it goes. I know some wifi cards aren’t even supported, so you should definitely pick up a prism based wifi card if you’re using Linux on a laptop.

CrunchBang Review

CrunchBang is a modified Ubuntu distribution with a light weight open box GUI. Perfect for lower resource computers. I could barely play a youtube video in Windows XP, on CrunchBang, it’s no problem. Why use CrunchBang instead of some of the other light weight distros? Some of those light weight distros are a real pain to configure, probably A LOT worse than what I had to deal with.

CruchBang is a nice mix of usability while still being light weight. All you have to do is right click on the desktop to get a list of all the applications installed, and there’s many that come already installed. Almost anything you would want is already there. Because it’s Debian/Ubuntu based, you can also just use apt-get or aptitude to install various things without issues. It can’t get much easier

Also, CrunchBang is open-box meaning you can customize the GUI the way you want it. Personally, I like the default config, it looks fine.

So, have a low resource computer you want to get a little more out of? Try out CrunchBang Linux. If your computer is really low resource however, you may need to look into something like Slackware Linux with a very light weight GUI.