On November 26th, Philip Newborough announced the third release of his fast and lightweight Linux distribution, CrunchBang 8.10.01, now based on Intrepid Ibex a.k.a. Ubuntu 8.10. CrunchBang is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu and powered by Openbox. CrunchBang includes applications such as Epiphany, The GIMP, Pidgin, Audacity, Gwibber or Abiword.

The new version introduces the following changes since the previous release:


• A new theme. Darker than before!;
• OpenOffice.org has been replaced by Gnumeric and Abiword;
• Tablaunch and AcidRip have been removed;
• By popular demand, dmenu has been installed. It can be activated with the Alt+F3 key combination;
• Twitux has been replaced by Gwibber;
• Mirage has been replaced by GPicView;
• pypanal has been replaced by lxpanel;
• Because it's a Qt4 application, the popular VLC media player has been replaced by Totem;
• Last but not least, some additional default shortcut keys have been added for the Main Menu and dmenu.

"Oh, and one last thing, CrunchBang Linux does not really use release names, although on the mailing list the 8.04.02 release had the code name, ‘Back in Black.’ Interestingly, the 8.10.01 image has a reported size of 666MB. Maybe the code name for this release should be, ‘Number of the Beast’? :)" - said Philip Newborough in the release announcement.

If you're asking yourselves, "What makes CrunchBang special, and why should I use it?", we've listed below the major differences between Ubuntu and CrunchBang:

• CrunchBang is sustained by the lightweight Openbox window manager, as opposed to GNOME;
• ROX-Filer and Thunar are used as file managers instead of Nautilus;
• Epiphany is used as the default web browser. However, Firefox remains available;
• CrunchBang comes packed with out-of-the-box support for MP3 and DVD playback, Adobe Flash, and other multimedia components;
• CrunchBang uses a modified Darkilouche GTK theme and Tango icons, as opposed to the Human theme used in Ubuntu.

Download CrunchBang 8.10.01 right now from Softpedia.