LMDE's roots. Debian (from scratch) or Crunchbang?

[TheGreatSudoku]

been pondering this, and haven't been able to find an answer by searching. One of the Devs kinda hinted to it on the newsletter...

Is LMDE based on Crunchbang?

or is LDME developed in-house completely from scratch using the Debian codebase.

I know Crunchbang is based on Debian...

Just kinda seems LDME is content to be "Crunchbang Gnome" as opposed to a flavor of Mint.

[tdockery97]

Hi Sudoku, saw some of your posts over at DistroWatch. Not sure what you mean. LMDE seems very Minty to me. Of course what stands out the most is the Mint Menu instead of the endless layers of straight Gnome menu. Of course I've never used ChrunchBang so I don't have a reference point, but LMDE does have the same Mint Tools as Mint 10. And from statements made by Clem and the Devs, I'm led to believe that LMDE was built on top of the stock Debian Testing base.

[TheGreatSudoku]

Mint Menu is an improvement over both Ubuntu's and default Gnome menus. That said, ever since I discovered GnoMenu, I've never gone back to MintMenu.

To me Mint is much more than the in-house developed repository apps specific to Mint. Mint is about the overall experience. It's about things like wireless cards, flash video, mp3 and DVD playback all working on a fresh install. It's about the ease of use of Nautilus, Mint Update, the Control Center. And yes about Compiz and eye candy. Linux Mint 9 was the peak of any Linux OS I've used.

I was hoping LMDE would follow in those footsteps, keeping ALL of the same app base and the same config settings that facilitate ease of use.

LMDE just feels liek Crunchbang.. like they started with that base and said let's not go all out Mint, let's keep it as Crunchy as we can. As I said LMDE seems more like Crunchbang Gnome than a Mint Variant.

[tec_wiz]

You have to give them time. This was an experamental release and they will continue to work on it. This is by no means the final product. Alot of those things that just worked (i.e. wireless and proprietery video) was because of Ubuntu's work not Mints. Mint just made them a little more friendly. To get that same ease in Debian someone would have to port those apps.

I'm sure that the Mint team is working hard on all of the mint distributions.

[Suo_Eno]

Don't know how you guys did it but I gave #! XFCE a shot yesterday and for half a day results were...not good for me at least.Keymap went haywire,my @ turned to ".Grub won't deal with the guided /,/home,/usr,/tmp and /var properly so I had to repeat loading installation files back and forth into / and /home setup again.By the time I was done with #! (nicely scripted?) updates after reboot (finally!) then voila I can only gksu synaptic instead of through the menus.Made 2nd and 3rd clean installs before I gave up and now I'm putting LMDE back.It's a shame that even so it's evidently way faster than LMDE since it's properly XFCE-tuned and looks so bad ass #! styled.

In a sense I disagree that LMDE is emulating #!'s approach since it's obvious that the diff installers are well different along with everything else.The tacts are diff since #!'s stuck to Debian's compliance of default apps and the #! way of "semi leets only" desktop/art cues from what I've seen.

Just sayin'.I'm a noob at this anyways so feel free to correct me.

[vrkalak]

I am a long time Debian user and a moderator of the http://ask.debian.net website.

When you install Debian, from scratch, as you call it (actually from a net-install) . . . you don't get "any desktop environment" or any Apps. pre-installed.
You select the D/E and W/M at the time of install, then have to install 'all' the Apps. yourself -- later.
If you go to the main Debian website to download the ISO files ... there are 10 or more DVDs;
Granted you only need the 1st DVD of the set, to install Debian, then must install the Apps via internet connection "or" download the entire set of DVDs, if needed.
I once bought a DVD of Debian 5.0 Lenny (3.7Gb) that had the ISO, a selection of D/E's and the basic Applications, on it.

If you decide to select to download a DebianLive CD (not an official version of Debian) ... you can select to download the Desktop Environment of your choosing.
The various derivatives of Debian (like LMDE or Crunchbang) make the Debian installation and set-up process so much easier.

To answer your original question ... the LinuxMint Devs took a straight Debian 'testing' and re-configured it for Mint.
The development of LMDE is in no way connected with Crunchbang.

On my main PC, I have 3 OS's . . . LMDE, #!Crunchbang-Statler and Debian 6.0 Squeeze.
Crunchbang-Statler r20101205 (based on Debian Squeeze) was just released a couple days ago.
Debian 6.0 Squeeze ... is in the final stages of 'freeze' to be released as final 'stable' before Christmas.

[tdockery97]

Hi vrkalak. After the above question I decided to check out the Crunchbang site and noticed you are active over there. Looks like an interesting distro. While in no way related to LMDE, it looks like both distros are going the same direction. Since there is an up-to-date iso release now, I may give it a try.

[willie42]

I like Crunchbang....I would have it installed but I dont have enough computers to have all the Distros I want set up on them... its really light at least it was when I had it in stalled not too long ago

[wayne128]

I like Crunchbang....I would have it installed but I dont have enough computers to have all the Distros I want set up on them... its really light at least it was when I had it in stalled not too long ago

If you computer can boot from USB, just try get one USB drive,, multi boot it so as to enjoy Linux fun.
Says 500G USB drive, 10G each partition,, you can play with 40-50 distros on it.
Be sure to get old USB 2 drive, many people reported new USB 3 cannot boot ( may be USB 3 chip set is not working with Bios?)

Furthermore, when you have USB drive, you can bring it to work on someone else computer and demonstrate Linux without changes to their computers.

[willie42]

I have one Pendrive I use for loading distros on other PCs. I am all the time playing with several right now I have like 5 loaded and running 3