ArchBang is so 2012….

Two things have bothered me for some time now, sound and booting. Managed to bring syslinux up to date and was planning on getting uefi booting in line with it. Then I looked at archiso which ArchBang is built from and they use grub efi, so figured I would try it out. First thing I noticed was iso image size is smaller by nearly 150Mbs and grub now includes a number of options in its menu including memtest.

This brings me on to the next issue sound. Have always shipped ArchBang with alsa dating back to possibly 2012! So I using pipewire and pavucontrol, may need to add a keybind to pavucontrol to allow a user to unmute, set, chose or generally configure sound. Can only do limited tests live as the only sound output available is via Firefox [aka YouTube etc]. If you load a media player then you may need to adjust settings to suit.

Marked the iso as ‘beta’ for now as you may wish to test before installing or updating an existing install.

One other thing I may look at is switching browsers. I love Firefox and have always used it from day one of switching to Linux but it is huge now! Using something like Midori or Netsurf live would save another 100Mbs plus to iso image size. Once installed a user could install whatever browser they wanted or even load it live. Smaller image size to me means faster build times, quicker downloads. Not going to please everyone but am sure users could live with the change live as they have with my changing to i3. If the reduction in size is dramatic I could ship with other useful applications.

Enjoy the rest of the weekend.

Stay safe 😉