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Using crunkbong (beginner's readme)

souperdoupe edited this page May 3, 2018 · 1 revision

This guide is intended for novice/semi-veteran Linux users. Advanced veterans can skim the headings and probably understand 90% of what's going on; anything else will probably be clarified or evident in the github repository as well.

Getting started

When you first run crunkbong, it will boot to a command line -- if you're not used to this, don't panic. Just type "startx".

Graphical Sessions

The default graphical session is openbox, a traditional window manager. Right-click on the desktop or panel (tint2) for a small menu of items you can run. If there is a program not listed in the openbox menu, I have set CTRL+D to open up dmenu, which lets you type the name of the program you wish to run. Openbox is small, but highly customizable: http://openbox.org/wiki/Help:Contents

Crunkbong also ships with dwm, which is a minimal tiling window manager. If you wish to use it instead of openbox, uncomment its line in ~/.xinitrc, and comment-out the openbox command. Then type startx.

A word of caution: if you've never used dwm before, please read its manual. Unlike traditional window managers, dwm uses keybindings. There are cheat-sheets for its usage available online: https://github.com/mmitch/dwm-mitch/blob/master/CHEATSHEET

Console sessions

If you want to work in the console, or in a graphical terminal, you probably don't need a readme ;) I've tried to ease the process a bit by including tmux and dvtm. Each of these offer a console-based tiling solution. dvtm is actually an ncurses spin of dwm, and resembles it in just about every way. tmux is less sophisticated, but still quite feature-rich.

Connecting to the internet

Devuan, and therefore crunchbang, use sysvinit with networking, along with the old-style ifconfig commands. For wireless, the use of wpa_supplicant and direct network/interfaces editing will establish a wireless connection.

#Wireless

Crunkbong doesn't ship with an official network manager (eg, wicd networkmanager). Instead, crunkbong ships with a wireless assistant: the script wefe-sup (wpa_supplicant) or wefe-if (network/interfaces files).

The rationale here is that, too often, network managers interfere with specific tasks (eg, airmon-ng). When booting to a live ISO, one would need to input wireless information anyways. One can also look at this from another angle: use wefe to establish a connection, then apt-get a more preferable wifi manager.

#Wired

For wired connections, the following dhclient command as root should work fine:

# dhclient (interface)

If you need to list all interfaces, type "ifconfig -a"

Browsing the web

At the moment, crunkbong ships with w3m and surf. I'm reaching out to the waterfox team to see if I can use it, too. After a network has been established, one could also apt-get install firefox-esr.

surf

surf is a webkit browser developed by suckless.org. It's feature-rich but very lightweight. A few useful notes about its usage: ctrl+G = navigate to a new website ctrl+R = refresh page

w3m (console)

w3m is a console browser based on ncurses. It does nearly everything except serious javascript. This w3m has been modified slightly to respect user anonymity. Since the browser is meant to be run in a console, it uses keybindings. Here are a few useful ones: shift+R = refresh shift+B = go back shift+O = options shift+M = open with alternate browser q = quit w3m

w3m also uses vim for editing or typing long blocks of text. If you're not used to this, write what you need to write, press ESC, and then type... :q! - exit without saving what you wrote :wq - exit saving what you wrote

List of applications

Anyone used to a taskbar with a windows-like menu, fear and fear not. This traditional style of menu is nice in that it displays all your applications. Shipping with very few programs, crunkbong utilizes two approaches for getting your app.

dmenu is a lightweight suckless.org project, and the counterpart of dwm. It's quite simple: type the name of your program (eg, "firefox") and press enter. It can be used with other window managers and sessions (the command is "dmenu_run"). In dwm, the syntax is MOD+D. In crunkbong, openbox has been modified to use dmenu_run when a user presses CTRL+D.

obmenu is an application that can edit the openbox right-click menu. This menu is static, for better or for worse. Crunkbong contains so few programs that I see no issue with a static menu for commonly-used apps.

If your app is not detected by dmenu or openbox's menu, try the following command in the terminal, as root:

# find / -iname *replacethistext*

replacethistext should obviously be your search string.