“While Ubuntu Linux continues to grow – in both popularity and new advancements for the Linux ecosystem – and dance in the limelight, it isn’t the choice for everybody. For those that may still be searching for their right Linux mate, Zenwalk 5.0 is a distribution worth trying out. Previously we have referred to Zenwalk as an unsung hero among Linux distributions and with the forthcoming 5.0 release it asserts a very well rounded Xfce desktop.”
This review is fairly shallow. What makes Zenwalk interesting and more compelling than, say, Mandriva, Opensuse or Debian, all of which can also use XFCE as the default desktop?
My current love is with Mandriva 2008, which is very fast and has great integration of 3-d composited desktop technology, making it totally transparent to the end-user. The only fault I would find is with their wireless connection manager, which is not very ergonomic when compared to network manager and knetworkmanager. Other than this it is flawless.
OpenSuse 10.3 boots very fast and has been absolutely solid on my desktop and I am running Debian on my servers and having a wonderful experience with that.
So what makes ZenWalk interesting? Inquisitive minds want to know.
Edited 2007-12-30 22:53
Basically, it’s based on Slackware. It’s a nifty distro if you love Slackware but don’t have time to set everything up yourself anymore. Other than that, it’s basically like any distro polisher – the “value added” is probably largely in user friendlyness and the community.
Personally, though I haven tried either of the most recent versions of Mandriva or OpenSuse, my exprience has been that both are fairly slow compared to a more strippy distro like Zenwalk (which is very, very fast).
I tried ZenLIVE 4.8 on an old PIII.
Alone the starting speed on this sort of obsolete system blew me away. I didn’t time it by stopwatch, but i can assure you it was faster than the currently installed Linux, which is not that slow either 😉
i have tried zenwalk 2, 3 and 4. so far so good, i was quite happy, since it provided a good way to use old HW. but now that xubuntu exists, what advantage do i get in using zenwalk5? a smaller cdrom? ok. but no apt, etc. please, somebody answer me.
“but now that xubuntu exists, what advantage do i get in using zenwalk5?”
Xubuntu is no substitute for older hardware; for whatever reason, these days it seems to be designed with runaway features in mind to bring in as many general and ease-of-use features in as possible, and lost its original intention: to be lightweight and fast. It looks and feels more like an Ubuntu clone running Xfce to me. You’d probably even be better off with just plain Debian on such hardware (or at least disable a bunch of pointless daemons right after install. In my experience, Slackware and its derivatives (especially Absolute, KateOS, Kwort, VectorLinux and Zenwalk) are some of the best-performing distros on older hardware. If you know what you’re doing, I’m sure Arch would be way up there on the list as well, and possibly CRUX.
I’m a somewhat newer Linux user, in that I’ve only really started looking into it as a potential replacement to Windows a couple years ago. I learned with KNOPPIX and SuSE, around 9.0 or 9.1 at the time, but never “switched” to either. I could have chose Ubuntu like the majority of recent Linux converts, but I instead wanted to learn this “new” OS. I wanted something lightweight and fast, without unnecessary bloat, while feeling “complete” and comfortable at the same time. Something that looked and felt pleasant to work on. Something that may have had good defaults and a nicely-done working desktop after install, but encourages the user to fix things and change things the old-fashioned way (ie. text files and command line). My choice was Zenwalk, around 2.2 or 2.4.
Long story short, I was able to learn a lot with Zenwalk, yet get started as soon as it was installed thanks to its nice default Xfce desktop. It works great on my RAM-starved system, offers a few GUI tools in case I want to use them, but more importantly it allows (and encourages) the command line and config files. I’ve been using Zenwalk exclusively for a couple years now, I think from around 2.6, and it’s been great. The only real problem slowly cropping up these days is the limited number of packages available. It truly was perfect for my needs at the time, but these days I’m not just learning Linux; I’m trying to actually *use* it for various things. Still, it’s more than enough for basic everyday tasks.
After trying dozens of distros, and despite its package-count shortcomings, Zenwalk is still one of my favorite distros out there.
From the web page there is a screenshot of the “Developers” stuff. There is an app there that I do not recognize. The link is:
http://www.zenwalk.org/images/screenshots-zenwalk-4.8/screenshot-ze…
What is that app that is editing the Style_002.css stylesheet? The tabs along the bottom make it look like it handles compiled languages as well as scripts. Any hints?
R
[Never mind, it is Geany (says so on the bottom of the page)]
Edited 2007-12-31 00:42
GHex
Edit: Sorry, I looked at the wrong window.
Edited 2007-12-31 01:13
It is Geany
Been using Zenwalk since about 4.2 days. It comes with software for almost everything including all codes for playing movies etc out of the box. Also has a nifty little package manager called NetPkg for installing extra stuff and updates.
Excellent and fast on old systems but fully featured not a stripped down OS!
Second post, someone already mentioning a Buntu.
I’ve been running both Xubuntu and Zenwalk on a P2 laptop.
Performance? Zenwalk beats Xubu in all fields. It’s less buggy too, frankly. But.. no dpkg.
Slack-based means elegance and simplicity of maintenance if you like to work text files. You don’t miss dpkg all that much, if you run the usual software suspects.
I don’t like Xfce all that much though, it’s a bit too thin too replace Gnome and too fat to be as fast as Fluxbox or the like. I fear Xfce will lose some of its relevance as memory gets cheaper all the time, since its footprint is smaller, but it’s not really faster than Gnome at all.
But you can make a lot of people happy with a ‘refurbished’ P3 or Duron with Zenwalk, perfect for most people.
I briefly used Zenwalk for awhile in college on an old hand-me down Compaq Presario with 256MB. Part of its appeal was the Slackware heritage, clean, minimal mentality and XFCE integration (side note: I’ve used XFce off and on since before it moved to gtk). Everything ran smoothly and stable, although I didn’t do much more than use the terminal, Seamonkey, and listen to MP3s. Zenwalk was a pleasant experience to work with. Unfortunately, I donated the computer to a church after the semester ended and more recently I’ve found myself using more and more apps that start with ‘K’. The 3.5x series of KDE has been one of the most stable environments I’ve worked in, and speed is no longer an issue on my new(er) laptop. The point is, however, that there is always room for a performance based XFce distro, and Zenwalk has filled that space nicely.
I agree with zombie process: Zenwalk is a good choice if you love Slackware but don’t have time to dig into the desktop.
I actually moved from Zenwalk 4.x about a year ago to a Edgy Eft. Zenwalk, basically, pissed me off because in my upgrade from 3.x to 4.x, it completely hosed my system. And this was the SECOND time a Zenwalk upgrade did that to me. Luckily, I partition my drives well so this isn’t disastrous.
Which isn’t all that big of a deal, except the tech support forums were rude and blamed ME because I didn’t find some obscure reference in some ancient forum post about some pre-work. My point was that the upgrade process should take care of that, or why bother providing an “upgrade process” at all? The distro maintainers agreed, to their credit, but I had to escalate the issue. Not a good way to run a distro.
So I bailed on Zen and went to Edgy. The upgrade from Edgy to Feisty was flawless. The upgrade from Feisty to Gutsy had one glitch with some USB change that only affected me in VirtualBox, and was fixed with a quick Google search and nobody blamed me for the problem.
Hooray for not blaming the user!
Also, DBUS and HAL are great and were a major reason I bailed on Slack and derivatives. I still use Slack on servers, but not as my daily powerhorse – I use Gutsy for that, and I love it.
Nowadays I think Gnome is just as fast as XFCE and I grew REALLY tired, REALLY fast of Thunar. I need a powerful file management app, Thunar isn’t it, and it’s a dealbreaker. On my 2.4GHz P4 system with 1GB RAM and a 256MB 6800GS, XFCE provides little benefit.
Zen also takes a lot of risks that Volkerding doesn’t take in terms of newer/less proven packages. I got bitten quite a few times and had to go back and spend several hours fixing things (uninstall/revert to older packages) manually. Luckily, I have the skills to do this. This was okay when I was single, but I share my MP3s via a drive on my Linux system, and I’m married with kids, so I have little time and people that depend on my system being UP (“Whaddya mean I can’t listen to my MP3s!?!?”). Not good, Zen. You lost me.
I cannot stress enough how significant this is going to be in the coming years. We Unix Illuminati are used to being able to intimidate new users and treat them like dirt. When we were in the majority, we had enough credibility to make them actually start blaming themselves. Now that Linux is beginning to go more mainstream, the balance of power is shifting. Communities which continue to treat users abrasively will find their communities, and associated distros, fading into irrelevance as more friendly communities and distros flourish.
And as long time Unix advocate, I say the sooner the better. Arrogance has no place in the future I hope to see.
Edited 2007-12-31 22:41
Could you *please* speak for yourself?!
Ohh, Slackware . . . <shudder>