CTKArch

CTKArch Website

CTKArch on DistroWatch

CTKArch highlights:

• A very light footprint and is lightning fast.
• One utility per function.
• Doesn't autostart anything (including Wicd)
• Comes with FBpanel and Tint2
• A great community (if you speak French)
• rxvt as the stock terminal emulator
• Is an Arch Linux derivative
• Uses pacman for package management

I'll start of with exceptions to the highlights. The philosophy of CTKArch (according to the distribution's website) is to use one application per function. This makes a lot of sense, and for the most part holds true, the only real exception I found was in the web browser category, as Arora and Midori were both present. This isn't detrimental to the quality of the distro by any means, it just caught me a little off guard. For everyone that loves Google Chrome or FireFox, which includes me, you'll need to install those yourselves. Again, not a deal breaker by any means, just a bit of a headache if you aren't familiar with pacman or installing from source. One more note about web browsers: Arora is a great browser and if you haven't tried it I recommend you do so.

Other "Network" programs that come stock include:

• Pidgin
• Sylpheed
• XChat
• gFTP

On to the second most important category of programs commonly included in a distro, the office utilities. You won't find OpenOffice or LibreOffice by default, which is great if you don't use them. You still get a word processor, spreadsheet editor, and PDF viewer by means of:

• Abiword
• Gnumeric
• ePDFviewer

This shouldn't be a problem for anyone, Abiword and Gnumeric do a great job, and if you really want to install OOffice or LibreOffice you can always use pacman or isntall from source. CTK also had GIMP waiting for me in the menu, which was a bit surprising considering the size of the .iso. I personally don't do much image manipulation, but for all of you artistic people I assume that GIMP is a good thing.

In the looks category I give a 5-star rating. It looks a lot better, please remember that this is subjective, than ArchBang. If you don't like the look of CTKArch, or you want to tweak it ever so slightly, you have easy access to lxappearance and obconf via the menu launcher.

Which reminds me, suspend to ram (and disk) are available in the menu. This a nice feature to come out of the box that a number of openbox distros don't have. I had no issues booting back into my session from ram or disk, the only concern I had was needing to go reconnect to my wireless connection.

BUG ALERT

The only bug I experienced was xwindows crashing when I ctrl+alt+F1 into a terminal, and try to get back into my X session.

Now that I have that bug off my chest, I can get to the summary.

CTKArch is a well put together, aesthetically pleasing, lightweight openbox, Arch derivative distribution. It definitely gets an A rating considering how young it is. If you aren't familiar with pacman, I'm going to suggest using Chakra first which I feel is a bit more user friendly. BUT, if you absolutely love openbox, CTKArch might not be a bad place to get your feet wet.

If you choose to install CTKArch know before hand that the installer isn't graphical. It is pretty user friendly if you know what partitions are, what UTC time is, and can read. If you haven't installed anything other than Linux Mint*, I recommend taking your time and being very sure of what you are doing, or installing it on a machine you don't use everyday.

I'm not going to hop immediately out of CTKArch like I normally would when I'm in a distro-hopping mood. All in all it is exactly what I want from a distro as I look for alternatives to CrunchBang. I'm also quickly becoming a fan of pacman for package management. I'll give it a week and then give a real review, not just highlights. 

*Linux Mint is used here because it has what I feel is the easiest install process/liveCD experience. Ubuntu, Fedora, and OpenSuSe are all relatively easy installs too, so this applies to people that only have experience installing them as well.