I've been distro-hopping/shopping lately, and last night it was time for Crunchbang Linux, a Debian-based distribution that uses a very nice implementation of the Openbox window manager.

Crunchbang is appropriately minimal but with its Debian underpinnings can be just about anything you want.

I used the 64-bit Backports (aka "bpo") image of Crunchbang Statler because the Lenovo G555 likes a newer-than-2.6.32 kernel.

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I'm not saying GNOME 3 won't allow me to do what I just did, only that it would be a crime for it not to.

By that I mean using System - Preferences - Monitors to spread my session across two monitors of different resolutions. It's easy (and sweet)!

Why am I using two monitors in the first place? The LCD power inverter (the thing that gets hot at the bottom of the laptop screen) in my Lenovo G555 is not-so-slowly dying, and until the part warms up, I have no backlight on the laptop, so a second screen is nice to have (though I probably should be mirroring them so I'll always have the menu available).

Of course if the backlight never turns on due to the LCD power inverter dying and then said inverter never warms up because the screen is dark, you quickly get into a situation where the screen just plain doesn't work.

I've ordered a new LCD inverter and will attempt to install it when the part arrives.

But for now I'm happy to say that using multiple monitors in GNOME 2 is pretty cool.

In an unrelated matter, I'm testing Crunchbang, using Gigolo to edit this file via SFTP. Very sweet!

I know ... Ubuntu 12.04 is in beta right now, I installed a daily build, and my Thinkpad R32 is 10 years old and has only 512 MB of RAM backing up a single-core Pentium 4 CPU.

But this is not the hardware that can adequately run Ubuntu 12.04 with Unity.

Everything was slow, the laptop was swapping like mad, the Software Center crashed more than a few times, and I couldn't make HUD work (not sure what it's for, to be honest, if it works this poorly -- I couldn't make it actually do anything).

Trust me, Debian Wheezy with GNOME 3 (which could only run in Classic mode) wasn't this bad.

I'm downloading ISOs of a Debian Wheezy daily (or is it weekly?) build and Bodhi Linux 1.4.0 to try now.

Debian Wheezy with GNOME 3 is up next (again). I'll let you know how it compares to Ubuntu 12.04 with Unity.

Spending a couple of days intensely running Linux Mint 12 on a very nice desktop PC sent to me for review by ZaReason (much more about that later), I probably shouldn't have been surprised by the annoying bugs in Mint that made me a lot less productive than I am in the Debian Squeeze system I've been running on my laptop since late 2010.

Not that Debian is trouble-free. It's just that I've figured everything out. And I don't have to reinvent this particular wheel every six months. If I hadn't done so in the intervening year and few months since I began running Squeeze, I'd have moved on.

But you can almost always figure out Debian. It's set up the way I want it. GNOME 2.30 is solid in a way that GNOME 3-point-whatever-Mint-is-using is not.

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