Review: CrunchBang ("#!") Linux 10 "Statler" Openbox r20110105

Main Openbox Screen

I've had a couple of encounters with #! before, starting with this review of version 9.04.01 and including this review of version 10 "Statler" Openbox (Alpha 2). I was pleasantly surprised by the features and minimalistic beauty of version 9.04.01, and I was later slightly let down by the relative lack of polish and removal of some features in version 10 (Alpha 2). Now, the #! developers have come out with a (actually, two) post-alpha release(s) of version 10 "Statler". The website says this:

Regarding the “20101205″ thing, this release and any future Statler releases will now feature a date based revision identifier. There will not be any more “alpha” images and you should not expect to see any “beta”, “RC” or “final” images either.  From this point on, if anyone needs to make a judgment as to the stability of Statler, they should check the date based identifier against the progress of Debian Squeeze.

Given that Debian 6 "Squeeze" is probably going to come out soon, I think it's safe to assume that this is a stable release. I grabbed the newest version (r20110105) of the Openbox release (there is also an Xfce release available which I did not test) and went on my way.
In terms of testing, I tested the live session through a live USB (made through MultiSystem) on my computer. I mentioned in my previous post that VirtualBox on my Linux Mint system is broken; given that, I installed VirtualBox within the #! live session and used the already-downloaded ISO file to install #! onto a new virtual hard disk of size 10 GB (with 1024 MB of RAM allocated to the guest OS) — more on that later. Follow the jump to see how #! compares and to see if it has improved any since Alpha 2.

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