 Today, I'm going to be taking a look at a Linux distribution that has a special place in my heart because this Linux distribution has been around for a number of years. It actually got started shortly after I switched to Linux. I switched from Windows to Linux around the year 2008, and a year or two after that, this Linux distribution called ArchBang arrived on the scene. ArchBang is a Arch Linux-based Linux distribution that uses the open box window manager, and what really made ArchBang special back then is, unlike today, we didn't really have any Arch Linux-based distributions back then. I know it sounds kind of weird because today, it seems like half the Linux distributions on the distro watch site are based off of Arch Linux. Arch Linux has become a very popular distribution to base other Linux distributions off of. But in the early days of Arch Linux, Arch Linux got started, I think around the year 2000, or maybe 2002. But really, for the first 10 to 15 years of Arch Linux existence, you really had no Arch Linux-based distributions. It really wasn't until Manjaro arrived on the scene about seven or eight years ago that all of a sudden, Manjaro kind of made it popular to base off of Arch Linux, and then you got the rise of other Arch-based distributions such as Arco and Synarch, which is now Endeavor, well, it was Antergos at one point, then Endeavor, and then Garuda, and now you probably have easily 100 other Arch Linux-based distributions out there. But really, ArchBang is kind of the OG, it's one of the OGs for Arch-based Linux distributions. And because it used the open box window manager, the name, by the way, ArchBang, is kind of a reference to CrunchBang. CrunchBang was a very popular Debian-based Linux distribution that was around when ArchBang first got started. CrunchBang was Debian with open box, and again, it was a very popular Linux distribution, CrunchBang. So ArchBang was basically putting it out there, hey, ArchBang is basically like CrunchBang, it's instead of being based on Debian, it's based on Arch. And for those first few years of ArchBang's existence, it was quite popular. Here in the last few years, it has been rather slow as far as ISOs being released, sometimes you go months or even years in between ISO releases. I think the last time I actually took a look at ArchBang on camera, I didn't look it up, but I bet it's been easily five or six years since the last time I actually took a look at ArchBang because you just don't hear about it anymore. And part of the reason you don't hear about it is in 2020 they actually released to ISO, but the lead dev, he decided to switch from using open box as a window manager to I3. And of course, I3 is a tiling window manager, open box is a floating window manager, so they're nothing alike on top of that. If you really wanted to use a tiling window manager, at least in my opinion, I3 is not a great tiling window manager, it's probably my least favorite tiling window manager. So he made the switch from open box to I3 in the year 2020, and he got a lot of backlash. A lot of the ArchBang users just were not interested in being an I3 distribution. So after about three years of, I guess, reflection on this and a lot of negative comments about it, he recently put out a new ISO. This is going to be a beta release that was put out really just a few days ago. And it is based on open box again, not I3. So I've downloaded the ISO and I'm going to take a look at this new open box release of ArchBang. I'm going to take a look at this in a VM. So I spun up a virtual machine here, I gave this virtual machine six gigs of RAM and I gave it two threads of my 24 thread CPU. So let's go ahead and boot into the live environment. I will say the grub screen here with the background. This is kind of nostalgic because this is, this wallpaper, I'm pretty sure they've used this in many years past. So you know, pretty cool. All right. And the live environment has loaded and again, this will be the open box is the window manager in the live environment. We do have a panel here at the bottom. I'm assuming this is tint two, tint two is kind of the traditional panel that a lot of open box users have used. It was the panel that was used in the old crunch bang distribution. It was the panel that ArchBang and previous releases always use with open box. It's the panel that I've always used with open box and some of my videos from many years ago when I focused heavily on open box as a window manager. So let's go ahead and run through an installation. So let's see, do they have a quick launcher here for the installer? It does not look like they do. I wonder if I right click and go to, well, here it is right here at the top menu install. ArchBang is not going to use the Calamari installer, the ubiquity installer or any traditional Linux GUI installer that you're familiar with. And this has always been the case with ArchBang because it really predates all of those projects. Again, ArchBang has been around for about 13, 14 years at this point. So let's go ahead and go through, I guess, this command line installation. So I'm going to choose one for the partition scheme. So let's go ahead and what do I want to do here? I'm just going to go with the default. And of course, if you wanted to use encryption, there is an option for you using Lux encryption as well. But for me, I'm just going to choose the default and let's go ahead and select a partition program. So you need to manually partition the drive and you could use CFDISC, CGDISC, FDISC, GDISC or parted. So these are all command line partition managers. I'm familiar with four of the five. The one I'm most familiar with though is CFDISC because it's pretty easy to use. So let's go ahead and enter the drive that we want to go ahead and partition. Now in this virtual machine, I only have this one drive slash dev slash VDA. So that's the only option for me. I'm going to make this a DOS partition because we're going to use master boot record here in the VM. But if you were using UEFI, then you would choose GPT for the partition. I'm going to go ahead and create a new partition. I'm just going to go ahead and give this partition the entire 25 gigs of space that I created for this virtual machine. I'm not going to go ahead and create a swap. I'll skip creating a swap for this VM. Swap is kind of wasted space in a virtual machine. So I've created the one partition. If I needed to change the type, I could arrow over to type, but it has correctly chosen the type as a Linux partition. We do need to make this drive bootable or this partition bootable. So let's go ahead and turn on the boot flag. And after that, let's go ahead and write. Are you sure you want to write the partition table? Type the word yes. And then once you've done that, you can quit out of the CF disk program. Now that we've created at least one partition, we need to select what is going to be the root partition. Well, slash dev slash vda1 is the single partition I created. So it's an easy choice for me to make. Do I want to confirm that it's going to format that partition for me? Yes, I'll confirm that. And then select the file system. I'm just going to use extend four. So I'll choose four in the options here. So it made our extend four file system. Now it says select a swap file system. Well, I really didn't want to create a swap. So I didn't create a partition for it. So three, skip. And then press enter to continue. And now let's go ahead and go to number two in the list, install arch bang. And it says installing please wait. And it finished the install arch bang portion of the installation. So let's go ahead and choose number three, which is setting up the hostname of the computer. So let's create a hostname. I'll call this arch bang dash vert. That sets the hostname for the computer. And then setting up the location. So number four is location. For me, I always choose America slash Chicago. So America is number two in the list. And then Chicago is number 40. Confirm the time zone is America slash Chicago. Yes. Then it says select a location. So this is our locale information. I need to choose the US. The United States is number 70 in the list. And then confirm that. Yes. And then setting up the hardware clock. So let's choose number five. And what do we want to do? We can choose either UTC time or local time. Let's use UTC time. And then six is setting up the locale. I need to set up English US. It'll be en underscore US. If I look through the list, en underscore US. I actually don't see it in the list. And I think the reason I don't see it in the list is the terminal is not big enough. Let me make the terminal full screen because there's some options. I can scroll back up in the terminal though. There we go. English US is number 93. So let me go ahead and choose 93 in the list. Confirm your locale is English US. Why for yes. All right. And then after that, it runs a make a knit CPIO. All right. Back to the main menu. Let's go ahead and choose seven for the desktop keyboard layout. So my keyboard is a US keyboard. US is number 95 in the list. And confirm that the key map is US. Why for yes. And then the boot loader. So choose number eight and select a boot loader. And obviously grub is the standard. So I'll do grub. And then grub installed. You wanna do an automatic install or the manual. I'll choose the automatic as long as it works. So see if it just sets up grub for me. So now let's choose number nine. I'm setting the root password. So the root password, let's create a strong and complicated root password. And then confirm the strong and complicated password. So press enter to continue. And now let's go ahead and create our user. So number 10 is create user. I'm gonna call my user DT. And let's create a strong and complicated password for the DT user. And repeat the strong and complicated password. And the password was successful. Press enter to continue. And it looks like we have completed all the steps of the installation. So now type D for done. And it says reboot system yes or no. I'll choose why for yes. And it reboots just fine. We have our grub menu. So it does look like the installation was successful. It says arch bang dash vert login. So we don't have a login manager. That's interesting. So I'm assuming we're just gonna use start X to login. I don't know. I'll go ahead and log in with my DT user. Yeah, it just uses start X, start X knows. Hey, there's only one window manager installed. Open box just automatically log us into open box. Now let me go ahead and get the screen resolution set to 1920 by 1080. Let's see if there's any system tools or anything available. It doesn't look like they have anything available to change the screen resolution via GUI. So I'll just use the terminal. So let me log into the terminal, zoom in and I will use the Xrander command. If I type X R and R, here is a list of all the available screen resolutions that I can use using the video driver that I'm currently using. And you can see in the list 1920 by 1080 is available. So now let's go ahead and set that Xrander space dash S for set 1920 by 1080. And that changes the screen resolution for us. But we need to redraw the wallpaper and redraw the cocky. It doesn't look like there is an easy way to do that. Well, there is cocky, just click on it. It does start a new cocky, but it doesn't kill this one. So if I do super T for a terminal, what I could do, I could do an X kill. X kill is a command line tool that kills an X program, an X org program. You can see my cursor turned into an X and any program I click on, it should kill it. But it does not kill that cocky. Well, let's kill all cocky. We'll kill all the cockies. And now let's redraw the cocky by going to accessories or what was it, system tools, cocky. And now we got the cocky in the right place. The wallpaper is still not in the right place. Let's see if there is a way to draw wallpaper. Did they install anything like a nitrogen or now I don't see the very minimal distribution, right? Arch bang, there's not much installed here. So let me do a sudo pacman dash capital S nitrogen. Let's go ahead and just install the nitrogen package. We need to do a re-sync of the database since this is the very first time using pacman after an installation. This is standard. Like if you do a standard base arch install, the very first time you use pacman do a SY, capital S lowercase Y, just re-sync the database and now let's install nitrogen. Nitrogen is a wallpaper setting program. And now from the terminal, I type nitrogen. Nothing happens because it looks like there is a key problem. So this is a standard problem on arch-based distributions, pacman, key, a knit. So what it is, when you have this problem and if you're a longtime arch user, you will occasionally run into this key issue where it's asking about pacman, key, and yet. And the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to do sudo pacman dash capital S lowercase C lowercase C and answer yes to all the questions. We're just going to get rid of all the existing pacman cache. And now I'm going to do a sudo pacman dash key dash dash and yet now I'm going to do a sudo pacman key dash dash populate and now that we've refreshed those keys, now if I do a sudo pacman dash SY and once again, I'll try to install nitrogen. Let's see if it installs properly without any key issues. Yeah, it installs just fine now. And now let me run nitrogen and now let's navigate to a folder that has some wallpapers. So I'll go into preferences and let's add a directory and the directory that your wallpapers typically live in on a GNU slash Linux system is slash user slash share slash backgrounds. Backgrounds is not here. How about slash wallpapers? Slash wallpapers is also not here. So we really don't have any backgrounds but I could quickly go and get us some backgrounds. Let me close out the nitrogen program so I can have my terminal back. I'm going to up arrow and I'm going to do a sudo pacman dash capital S and I'm going to install this package GNOME dash backgrounds. And that should have been with an S. And this is the wallpaper pack that is standard with the GNOME desktop environment. And now that we have some wallpapers installed now I'll launch nitrogen again. I'll go into preferences. I'll add a directory. I'll go into the root file system slash user slash share slash backgrounds slash GNOME and there is this directory for the GNOME wallpapers. I'll just select it okay and here are the GNOME wallpapers and I'll just choose one that I'll think will look all right. How about this blueish green one? Let's go ahead, make sure that is on monitor one. It's the only monitor. But if you had multi monitors you would have screen one, screen two, screen three. For example, if you are in a triple monitor system I should have had that stretch to fill the screen. So let me go ahead and run nitrogen again. Rofi is installed because the cocky tells me super R runs Rofi. So let's go ahead and run nitrogen from Rofi. And now let's go ahead instead of automatic let's do a zoomed fill hit apply. And yeah, that is much better for the wallpaper. And really there isn't much to take a look at with ArchBang out of the box because it is such a minimal installation. You have the very basic of programs. ArchBang was really, when I say it was one of the first Arch Linux based distributions it really was and all ArchBang in the beginning really was trying to be, it was trying to be a way to install Arch with a graphical installer, right? You didn't have to install Arch the Arch way. But at the end of the day it's really Arch, right? It's really a base Arch install with just a few extra things installed. The open box window manager which is a very, very small program. They went ahead and installed us the terminal. This is the Alacrity terminal. By the way, they did install a web browser. Firefox is here and we have the quick launchers down here in our tent two panel. Let's see what version of Firefox this is on. And I have not updated the system yet but this ISO isn't terribly old. Just a few days old. This is Firefox 117.0.1. And we have this hammer here. So this would be our file manager, the Thunar file manager, Thunar 4.18.7. Close that. We also have a system tray in our tent two panel. This is the network manager applet. So yeah, network manager applet. So they're using network manager obviously for the networking. The only other thing that I see, Super G opens a guide. I'm assuming like this is a guide to Arch main kind of help information. So Super G and it launches a terminal and a text editor. Basically just, it launches our leaf pad text editor, our plain text editor. And it has this file that opens up giving us some basic information on how to use Openbox, how to run through the installation. And it does give us the information we needed on how to fix that Pac-Man key problem with the init and the populate commands. Thankfully I'd run into that Pac-Man key issue so many times on my Arch based systems that I pretty much got all of that memorized at this point. Now for those of you that are new to Openbox, you're gonna want some better ways to configure Openbox because by default, let me remember the key bindings here for the base alacrity config by cdn2.config slash openbox. I'm doing LS. These are the Openbox config files and one of them is the menu.xml. So let's open that with vim and it's a xml file that you can edit and when you edit that, of course it allows you to add and remove things from this right click Openbox menu. So you would manually add and remove things from your menu, which honestly I don't mind because I like putting exactly the things I want in my menu systems and I don't like them necessarily being automatically generated, but if you want easier ways to do that, there are some programs out there. If I do a sudo pac-man dash capital S, one program you want is obmenu. This is a graphical tool that allows you to edit your Openbox menu. It says target not found. So you're probably gonna have to grab obmenu from the AUR. I doubt they have yay installed, yake is not found, paru probably also not found. So, but there is a AUR package called obmenu that gives you a GUI tool that would allow you to edit this right click Openbox menu. Couple of things I do wanna check in the terminal before I go, let me once again zoom back in. Let's do a quick uname dash or the kernel version is 6.5.3, so very recent kernel. Let's see how many packages are installed out of the box because honestly, this is such a minimal distribution. Pac-man dash capital Q lowercase q gives us a list of all the packages that are installed via pac-man line by line, which makes it really easy to get a count because all I need to do is pac-man dash capital Q lowercase q and then pipe it into WC space dash L to get a line count. There are only 533 lines in that output. So there are only 533 programs installed out of the box here on ArchBang. And honestly, I added GNOME dash background so really it's only 532 packages installed out of the box, extremely minimal. I'm assuming if I did aware is pipe wire. Pipe wire is here. I kind of expected that because pipe wire is a standard on the base Arch Linux installation now. So not much installed out of the box at all. So this is really a great way to install Arch Linux, a very minimal base installation of Arch Linux with the open box window manager, which is really one program. It doesn't have any dependencies. Open box is a very, very small program. And honestly, you could use ArchBang even if you didn't want to use open box. You use ArchBang to install Arch rather quickly and easy, right, and then you can install whatever window manager or desktop environment you want to use if you don't want to use open box. So that was really ArchBang's claim to fame, you know, in the early days, you know, 13, 14 years ago when it first got started is you didn't have any distributions like this. There was no easy way to install Arch Linux. So that's what a lot of people used ArchBang for. They didn't necessarily want to use open box. They just wanted to run Arch. So they used ArchBang kind of as a Arch installer. Now, most people probably haven't heard of ArchBang, especially if you're a recent convert to Linux. You probably have never even heard of this distribution because this distribution, it's not as necessary now because now we've got so many different ways to install Arch Linux. You got a hundred different arch-based distributions out there now that you didn't have back then. And then you've got all the third party GUI installers, command line installers. People have Arch Linux post installation scripts. Such as myself and many others out there. But for me, I do think that this is a fantastic distro and I am happy to see that after all these years, they're still putting out releases. Now, before I go, I want to thank a few special people. I want to thank the producers of this episode, Daniel Gabe James, Matt Paul, Royal West, Armored Dragon commander, Angry George Lee, Methodos Nate, Hurrion Paul, Peace, Arch and Fator, Reality's 4 Less, Red Prophet, Roland, Solastry, Tools Devler, Wardgent 2, and Abutu and Willie. These guys, they're my highest tier patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at the latest beta release of Arch Bang would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux and friend open source software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace guys. That command line installation is pretty slick.