Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “Zenwalk”
Mini-Review: Zenwalk 6.2
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.
[caption id=“attachment_3019” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“The final part of the Zenwalk 6.2 install”] [/caption]
Review: Zenwalk 6.0
Back in Nov of 2008 I checked out Zenwalk 5.2 and a recent LXF contained Zenwalk 6.0 - so let’s see what has changed. It loads up with the usual Kernel messages going past on the screen. The first screen for the installation hasn’t changed one bit from Zenwalk 5.2.
[caption id=“attachment_2299” align=“alignleft” width=“150” caption=“Zenwalk 6.0 - setup ncurses screen”] [/caption]
Once again, as before, I chose autoinstall. Once again, the installation was sparse, but very, very informative. I don’t think I mentioned this last time, but it appears that Zenwalk 6.0 (maybe earlier versions as awell) uses the xfs file system instead of the more usual ext3. (Or, recently, ext4) According to the wikipedia article I linked to, XFS is very good for large files and is one of the oldest file systems for *nix systems. Just like last time, the installation had information on every single package as it was installed. Just as last time I want to say that this installation was very, very simple. I don’t see why anyone new to Linux (but not a total computer noob) would have any problems installing it. Sure, it’s very short on eye candy - but who cares? You should only ever see the installation screen once. Just as before, I am convinced that Zenwalk is a very good introduction to a Slackware-type distribution thanks to this ease of installation.
Review: Zenwalk 5.2
Somewhere along the line I got into my head that Slackware was a distro that involved having to compile everything. From what I can gather from Wikipedia, The Slackware Website, and some comments to my Gentoo post, I was wrong. Slackware apparently uses packages, just like every other modern distro. The difference is that dependency resolution (at least with the default first-party tools) is up to the user. This clears up so much for me because I always wondered why someone would want to make a distribution based off of Slackware if the point of Slackware was to compile from source and be super hardcore. After all, Slackware doesn’t baby you and give you all these little GUIs to configure your system. You need to get down and dirty with Emacs (or even dirties with Vi) and edit those config files. Here’s what the Slackware site gives as the reason to use Slackware: