tweaking Crunchbang

The nice thing about openbox window manager is the way you can configure almost everything in easy by editing text files or some simple gui's.
I use a high resolution monitor, so I need larger fontsize. Start with Obconfig,
in #! you will find that under preferences, openbox, openbox config, GUI config tool. choose tab Appearance and change font sizes. ( Note the beautiful and clever the window buttons are configured: DSLIMC
D Omnipresent S Shade L Label I Iconify or Minimize M maximize and C Close).

This is not the only way to set lettersize; you might have lxappearence running, sometimes hidden in the menu as GUI settings; here you can set the lettersize below left on the first Window tab. Don\ t forget to use gksudo lxappearance to resize letters using gui apps as root
Lettersize in Conky by editing .conkyrc
I also ad a new image viewer toe: Ristretto and for writing Abiword.
You will have to edit the .rc.xml file for adding keybindings,

The default English keyboard is also changed to US and other localization files. See a post before this one. Don't forget to choose a local server in Synaptic for faster downloads.

Persistent USB drive CrunchBang install

This means you can save your settings an have a system going.

The following tutorial covers the process of installing CrunchBang Linux to a USB Flash Drive via the CrunchBang Live CD. In addition, the casper persistence feature will be utilized to allow a user to save and restore changes automatically. CrunchBang Linux is based on Ubuntu, featuring a lightweight Openbox window manager.

source:

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/crunchbang-linux-flash-drive-install-via-cd/

Creating a CrunchBang Persistent Flash Drive from the Live CD

1. Download the CrunchBang 8.10.01 ISO and burn it to a CD ( I used 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope)
   
2. Reboot your PC from the CrunchBang Live CD
3. Insert your USB flash drive
4. Open "terminal emulator" and type sudo su
5. Now type fdisk -l to list available drives/partitions (note which device is your flash drive Example: /dev/sdb). Throughout this tutorial, replace all instances of x with your flash drive letter. For example, if your flash drive is sdb, replace x with b. The following step 6 I did with Gparted
   
6. Type fdisk /dev/sdx
   • type p to show the existing partition and d to delete it
   • type p again to show any remaining partitions (if partitions exist, repeat the previous step)
   • type n to make a new partition
   • type p for primary partition
     • type 1 to make this the first partition
     • hit enter to use the default 1st cylinder
     • hit enter again to use the default last cylinder
     • type a to make this partition active
     • type 1 to select partition 1
     • type t to change the partition filesystem
     • type 6 to select the fat16 file system
     • type w to write the new partition table
7. Remove and reinsert your flash drive
8. Type umount /dev/sdx1
9. Type mkfs.vfat -F 32 -n CrunchBang /dev/sdx1 ( I kept the usb drive on fat16 because I read somewhere Fat32 could lead to problems )

If you have problems giving the usb drive a label see here:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RenameUSBDrive

I use this:

sudo mlabel -i bracket_device_bracket ::bracket_label_bracket

got this error

If you get a message like this: Total number of sectors (7831520) not a multiple of sectors per track (63)!

You can easily ignore the check by running this command:

echo mtools_skip_check=1 >> ~/.mtoolsrc

This instruction supposes your pc can boot from an USB stick. My bios made that impossible. In the next story howto boot a boot USB with a boot cdrom and how to make a boot cdrom like that

crunchbang

This is the most accessible way to experiment with Openbox.
See a nice review here

But a much nicer way is to follow this guide by Urukrama

Working with Openbox is addictive because of its simpleness, very productive because of keybindings and dmenu. Other good points are its ease of configuration, its wonderful looks, its fastness, low system requirements.
It's the complete opposite fo Winows Vista where everything is bloated and overdone with unnecessary complicated menu's.
On a well configured Openbox system the learning curve for pc newbies will be much and much lower than on any other configuration I know.

This is the way to go for people in education working with older hardware and possibilities to deploy a specific software setup.

Another competitor in this field is SliTaz
The wonderful thing about SliTaz is that it is the ideal on-the-road distro with a Usbstick on which you can very easily put your home partition. A problem I found that it doesn't support a very high screen resolution.
A critical review here

Just try it and you'll never regret it.