Once upon a time there was DSL (Damn Small Linux) which provided a full workable system in a 50 MB image. I used to have it on a small partition for repair and rescue tasks on my desktops. It was never or at least very rarely needed as I recall, but I liked the pre-set radio stations in XMMS and the backgrounds and conky config in DSL, so I ended up running it more and more over Zenwalk 2.6, which at the time was using a very half-baked early XFCE 4.4, if only to listen to internet radio on a geeky minimalistic looking box.

It seems that after the Samsung Galaxy S II surprised at least me with extremely good voice control for daily operation, Apple´s iPhone is next to make life easier for the Disabled, and everybody who would rather talk than type. Technology is getting there, and as a care manager I can only be happy for the people with visual and other physical impairments that make it difficult to operate devices the traditional way.

This should originally have been entitled 'The Sabayon Xfce Spin Revisited', but something disturbing happened. It's been a while since I tried Xfce 5.3 last August, but in the fast moving world of software and technology a year can be a long time. Back then I was a bit unhappy about the size of 628 MB that gave the user little more than Firefox and the package manager.

Most people who have dabbled in Linux for a while "know" that Slackware is difficult to install, configure, make work and keep up to date. It is an OS only for geeks. Not so. These days the developments in the wider universe have trickled down to Slackware as well, and having something like KDE 4 as default desktop already means plenty of things taken care of, with all the utilities and options this desktop environment is providing.

It's just a little over a year now that I first installed ArchBang with 2010.09 that had just been released. In comments to my following review a poster expressed the opinion it would be interesting to see how this would develop and if it would still be working in a year from then. So here we are. I've tweaked the install and kept it updated at my leisure, and it is still working fine. Over time the ArchBang base I started out with has turned into Arch Linux, as you would expect it to when pointing at Arch repositories.

Hooray, yet another ArchBang release barely a month after the last. I think Will likes to give us options as he keeps changing things around.
Chromium is out again and Firefox Nightly is now the browser of choice. The Openbox Applications menu now has icons. Not sure if that might slow loading time down a bit. You can now edit keyboard layout configuration while installing ArchBang, and the Getting Started help has been updated. Read the release announcement here.