Yesterday I downloaded the slackware based Zenwalk 4.0 and installed it in my home PC. I decided to give it a try because of my PC configuration :) and the good reviews in distrowatch weekly.
Config:
AMD sempron 2600 + 256 MB RAM + 80GB HDD + ASUS VIA KT400 chip set (on board VGA).
I have added some screen shots in my album. It does not have any installation screen shots :) .
Installation
I've burned the ~400 MB iso and started the installation. The installation was text based and simple. It asked for the keyboard selection, partitioning, network configuration etc. The partitioning can be done by fdisk kind of utilities and once done we have to assign the mount points and start the installation. The installation was really fast. After file copying the system asked me to configure the mouse, keyboard layout, network card, timezone, services etc... . Once done the system asked where to install the boot loader. Since I already have mepis I just installed in the root partition itself. The system restarted and I edited my grub config and I was into zenwalk shortly.
Zenwalk configured the on board VGA correctly but it did not load the GUI. This was the same case with most distributions I tried. Anyway I edited my xorg config file to use the 'vesa' driver and rebooted the system and I was able to login into XFCE. Every other hardware was detected properly. Loading XFCE was real quick.
Some of the highlights of Zenwalk are
2.6.18.2 kernel
XFC 4.4 RC2
Xorg 7.1
Firefox 2.0
Gaim 1.5.0
Desktop
zenwalk comes with the one application per task and the package selection is well done. Audacious as the audio player, xine as the video player, gimp for photo editing, gaim for IM, bluefish for the development, Firefox as the browser ,Thunderbird as the mail client, Abi word for document editing ,graveman for cd/dvd burning and nekpkg for package management.
I was able to play mp3, encrypted dvds. But first time I opened gxine got the 'core dumped'. After a reboot I was able to play dvds but when I switched to full screen the display was bit slow(the DMA is ON for the dvd drive).
There were good reviews about Zenwalk's package manager ,but since I do not have internet connection at home, I could not check the application with installing applications. But anyway it looked simple and categorized in a clean manner and the removal of applications is really easy. The latest version of KDE and GNOME are available in the online repositories.
The 'appfinder' application which helps to find an application may not be useful since you can always browse the menu(at least for me). The 'ZEN' theme looks really good. This is the first time I'm using XFCE and I think if you are a GNOME user then you will feel right at home.
Two simple and useful applications worth mentioning are the 'serviceconfig' which configures the service daemons and the 'graveman' cd/dvd burning tool.
Final Thoughts
In my conclusion zenwalk is really stable, usable and fast. The only problem I had so far is the gxine full screen playback (not sure why). If zenwalk had a graphical installation mode it would have been an added advantage to Zenwalk.
If you are looking for a distribution with latest packages which can run pretty fast for a low hardware configuration then go for Zenwalk. You can always start with minimal set of applications and add applications as per your needs which is an advantage for zenwalk. So go ahead and give it a try.
Please send your feed backs to vasanth.rajan at gmail.com
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