BunsenLabs Linux

Today, I watched Veronica Explains install BunsenLabs Linux. It looked like fun, so I tried it on an old laptop. Worked great! Indeed, I'm not even sure why I'm blogging about it because the install went without a hitch. I had to reboot after partitioning, which shouldn't have been necessary, but everything worked perfectly.

The current release of BunsenLabs Linux is called Boron and it's based on Debian 12. It is very current indeed as it was only released two days ago (2024-01-24).

It uses the OpenBox window manager. And it really is just a window manager, not a "desktop environment." On top of OpenBox, BunsenLabs uses tint2 for a panel, jgmenu for an X11 menu, and conky for an X system monitor.

The terminal is lxterminal. I installed and ran neofetch. As you can see, it's a very modest little computer from over a dozen years ago. But it runs pretty well!

Of course, one of the first things I did was install Emacs!

I noticed that the

sudo apt install libgccjit-12-dev

step was not needed. Apparently, it's been added to

sudo apt build-dep emacs

Either that or BunsenLabs included it already for some other reason.

Now I just need to finish configuring everything to my liking. The desktop computer I use every day is Debian 12 with Xfce. So I'm familiar with the Debian 12 stuff, but I'll need to research how to configure all of those non-Xfce things. Fun, fun, fun!