I looked at Zenwalk 6.0 back in June and Zenwalk 6.2 is now out.  I’m going to do a mini-review just comparing 6.0 to 6.2 to see what has changed.  This may end up being very short if it’s mostly the same.  One difference right away is that it’s using ext4 instead of XFS.  The install was basically the same.

In my Slackware 13 review mfillpot gave some suggestions to improve the Slackware experience and I thought I would give them a shot.  First off, changing the init level to 4 to allow KDM to show up instead of this startx business.  I was happy to note that Slackware had emacs.  So many distros have vi and I never really learned how to use it well.  So I changed the value to 4 and restarted.  And there she is:

So I was unable to preupgrade to Fedora 12, even after the latest update.  So I did a yum upgrade since I’ve known that to work in the past.  As always, I followed the instructions here.  It was very fast this time around compared to past upgrades.  It only took 2 hours 40 minutes.  I ended up needing to tell yum to ignore problems because of a weird package that it wanted to install, but couldn’t.  But then installed anyway.  I’m not sure what’s up with that.  The specific package was abrt.  And then when I went to install it afterwards, it said it was already installed.  Go figure!  So far there’s only one thing that annoys me since upgrading.  All my taskbar icons are much more spread out.  I tried to push them together, but I think this is as close as they get.  See the images below for a comparison.

At work they were asking us to get familiar with openSolaris for a potential future project.  I’d played with it a few years ago, so I decided to check out the latest version I had.  On of my LXF discs had openSolaris 2008.11 and I figured that while I was checking it out I’d review it as well.  I expected it to be spartan like FreeBSD, but it appears that Sun has learned a lot from the Linux community.  It booted up to this grub screen:

A bit more complicated than it should have been.  That’s really the lesson here.  In fact, it appears not to have worked at all despite about five tries.  The first two times I did it 100% with the GUI and had no idea why things were going wrong.  The third time I did it on the command line so I saw that it was complaining about not having enough space - even though it did.  And the fourth time I used the “trick installer into downloading” trick on this page and it still didn’t work.  It appears not to be downloading the updates.  I’m going to take to the mailing lists to try and figure out what’s going on.  No one was able to help (or willing?) on the IRC so for now I remain with Fedora 11.

Even though I gave up on reviewing Linux distros a while back, I keep getting mountains of hits on here for people who who want Linux reviews.  Since my Slackware 12.2 review was the second-most commented post on this blog, I decided it was a good distro to revisit.  So, when Slackware 13 came a few months ago on the LXF magazine, I decided to throw it into Virtualbox to see how it has changed.  One difference this time around is that I now have the dual core machine so I am running Slackware on that machine (especially since it has hooks for better virtualization so it should run better)

The latest version of Fedora is out.  Get it here!  I’ll probably give it about a month to get all the kinks out and then I’ll give it a shot and talk about it here.  I’m excited for some new versions of programs like gPodder.  I also want to check out Gnome Shell, the new interface for Gnome starting with 3.0 next fall.

From the time I started listening to podcasts until about two months ago, I had been using Rhythmbox to manage my podcasts.  When I first started using a Linux music application, Banshee ran hideously slow on my computer.  (As did most mono-based products)  As time has passed I’ve acquired a more powerful Linux computer and the mono code has been made more efficient.  But it was too late, I was already ingrained into Rhythmbox and it had all my music rated.  So I continued to use it.  On Linux Outlaws they kept mentioning how much they loved gPodder.  I checked out an early version and I didn’t see the point.  But after upgrading to Fedora 11, I decided to check it out.  It is so much better for managing podcasts than Rhythmbox and that goes to the Unix ideal - have your program do only one thing and do it well.  Banshee, by the way, is the opposite of that.  It seems to be moving in a Windows Media Player direction, recently gaining the ability to play videos as well.  So, here’s a comparison of Rhythmbox and gPodder and you’ll be able to easily see why I switched.  First, here’s the podcast interface for Rhythmbox.

A few weeks ago I did an update to Fedora 11 using preupgrade.  Nothing really broke other than iPods.  My shuffle doesn’t work as well, but I’m working on fixing that.  I also think that the updates are less annoying-looking and are more informative.

All good things come to an end.  In this specific case I’ve decided to end my tenure reviewing Linux distros.  Being a home owner consumes a lot more of my time than being a renter.  Doing a quality distro review takes a lot of time - usually at least 2 - 4 hours.  And so it was that I came to decide I’d rather spend my time on the hobby I enjoy most - photography.  Also, I’ve grown bored with Linux.  Not that I’m giving up on running Linux on my computers.  But it just doesn’t excite me as it once did.  I’m strongly considering letting my Linux Format Magazine subscription lapse.  It was a tough decision because 90% of my blog’s traffic comes from Linux reviews.  But, with only so much time in the day, I’d rather just work on my photography.  So, very likely, this will be my last Linux review unless I get into it again.  I will still probably be blogging about Linux and technology, I just won’t be doing any full-blown reviews.  The big exception would be if I installed a new distro on one of my machines.