[Tfug] Latest weird distro tested: Zenwalk

[Jim March]

Well, the free version of Mandriva was a wash.  Workable enough but features
would drop out here and there plus shutdown via the gui was a crapshoot -
got dropped to command line a lot, and while "shutdown -h now" doesn't
bother ME, it would drive a newbie nuts.

So, the search for the "Grandma Millie" distro continues :).

And my first few hours with our latest contestant has gone shockingly well.

If you'll recall a previous exiting episode, "Sabayon" (a Gentoo semi-fork)
crashed and burned hard in a trail of flaming electronic wreckage.  Whoops.
"Grandma Millie" would have had a heart attack.

So what the hell is "Zenwalk" 4.4.1?

It's a Slackware fork (I know, y'all are laughing at this point) and
supports just one desktop environment: XFCE (but with tweaky bits of Gnome
and KDE tossed in).  Kernel is 2.6.20.x, Xorg is 7.1.

But by God, the damnthing works!  Multimedia codecs are live from the
get-go, Firefox is at 2.0.0.1, OpenOffice 2.1 is available from the primary
repository as is Wine 9.30x, and...holy crap, it really works GOOD.

It can eat most Slackware packages but has it's own as well.  The package
management system is, I kid you not, BETTER THAN DEBIAN/UBUNTU in terms of
ease of use.  Breadth, well no, but it ain't half bad.

The exact same tool works at both the command line and GUI
(netpkg/xnetpkg).  There's no particular stability issues on one versus the
other - both handle dependencies equally well (so far zero issues, and I've
installed half a dozen major bits).  In the GUI version, you don't "add"
repositories separately, you simply pick them from a pop-up menu complete
with descriptions of each.  Once one is selected, the packages within that
repository are listed including descriptions.

No editing text files needed.

By default, Firefox is linked to a spell-checker such that words get
underlined as I type this in GMail.  I haven't seen that right out of the
box since Ubuntu Edgy.

The handling of multiple desktops is the best I've seen by default.  You can
drag windows to another desktop and then at that desktop, only the running
programs in that desktop will be displayed in that task bar.

Installation is text-only, but only moderately hardcore.  Not for the total
newbie but anyone on these forums can easily cope.

There are separate installer and liveCD disks.  The LiveCD version is
slightly downgraded but once booted is able to see the data on both the
primary hard disk and any USB disks, making it a solid tool for data
recovery or system reconfig in case of a blowup.

I'm flat shocked at how well this sucker is working so far.  It has given
zero signs of impending doom the way Sabayon did and even reads my system's
ACPI stuff correctly...better than Mandrake, Fedora and even Ubuntu (both
flavors) did.

I'm gonna pound on it hard over the next week, add a bunch of stuff and
report back.  But so far I'm seriously impressed with this dark-horse
critter.

Jim