LinuxBBQ Lightside

LinuxBBQ Lightside is an open source and free operating system, a special edition of the LinuxBBQ distribution based on Crunchbang Linux and built around the Openbox window manager.

Available for download as a 64-bit Live CD

The Lightside edition of LinuxBBQ is available for download as a Live CD ISO image that has been engineered to support only 64-bit (x86_64) hardware platforms, despite the fact that it supports both 32-bit and 64-bit applications. It has approximately 600MB in size and must be written to either a CD disc or a USB flash drive in order to boot it from the BIOS of a PC.

Boot options

Just like the Darkside edition of LinuxBBQ, this one features a standard boot menu that allows the user to start the live environment with default boot options, with support for Intel graphics cards, with the nomode and VGA options, in failsafe mode or by copying the contents of the ISO image to RAM. In addition, you can boot from the local drive or run a memory diagnostic test.

Very fast and lightweight desktop environment powered by Openbox

The default and only desktop environment is powered by the Openbox window manager, which features a single panel located on the upper part of the screen, from where you can cycle between virtual workspaces and interact with opened apps.

In addition, the main menu can be accessed by right clicking anywhere on the desktop, allowing the user to easily launch applications. As usual, you must first log into the graphical session using the “bbq” username and “bbq” password.

Includes a minimal set of open source applications

Besides the usual CLI (Command-line Interface) applications and the BBQ tools, the distribution also features various graphical apps, among which we can mention the Viewnior image viewer, VLC Media Player, Xfburn CD/DVD burning software, Iceweasel web browser, gFTP file transfer client, Transmission torrent downloader, XChat IRC client and Evince document viewer.

Bottom line

As mentioned in the review of LinuxBBQ Darkside, the Lightside edition comes without the GIMP image editor, AbiWord word processor and Gnumeric spreadsheet editor applications, at the request of many members of the LinuxBBQ community.