Archived thread 394696 from Slackware and derivatives. Markdown source: Slackware_and_derivatives/thread_394696_Zenwalk_experiences.md
I gave Zenwalk a try before but was frustrated by a very slow boot (once I had installed madwifi), failure to ever get wireless up and running, and a buggy XFCE that crashed my apps when I moved windows.
I know that everyone else seems to love the distro...have you been able to overcome these problems and make Zenwalk a truly day-to-day machine?
I'm curious about typical tasks like...organizing photos, music, using an iPod, ripping CDs, creating documents for work, playing games, etc.
Very easily. I would admit that Zenwalk does not make having of other window managers or certain things as easily as Ubuntu or pclinuxos. I loved it for a while and still consider it one of the fastest distros that is feature rich. I am back to trying out Ubuntu feisty and pclinuxos2007. These are very easy to use distro. Sam linux is nice as well and like Zenwalk is xfce 4.4 based. However, Zenwalk just flies much faster.
Granted you have to install flash, and any other thing you may need.
If you've never used Zenwalk much before, you may be blown away once you get familiar to its simplistic way of functioning.
It also has a great gui and cli package manager for installing softwares similar to apt-get or synaptic from Ubuntu or other debian-based distros.
It is slackware made very simple. I can do samba, amarok, burn dvd or CDs, create documents. Playing games., and everything.
The system is not bloated. However, you may complain on things like auto-mounting. When I put a DVD, I expect it to pop open a prompt like in windows or ubuntu or many others that a media has been detected. Zenwalk just waits for you to click on the media icon to launch it. No real big deal though.
Beryl ran beautifully on it last time I used it. Beryl runs faster on Zenwalk than on Ubuntu. Give it a try. But Ubuntu makes having apps ridiculously easier.
Agreed. Insanely fast and if you don´t mind it keeping it simple (like forget about that ¨vast as an ocean¨ ubuntu repo in favour of the ¨one tool for every task¨ philosophy) and doing some things manually (perhaps even ¨reading¨ something, after all it wasn´t that long ago when ubuntu required reading too) it´s the kind of distro that makes your machine... well... enjoy being yours - no resource consumption beyond the absolute necessary, everything you need and a tight community (thought still not as vast as the ubuntu or gentoo ones I guess). I currently am double-booting Zenwalk and Ubuntu, so believe me - I am talking first hand here. Peace to you friend. Burn.
Oh, and sorry if I sounded a bit like some guy from a TV commercial. It´s just a satisfied guy talking.
I don't use wireless, so I can't comment on that. I have found zen to be fast and rock solid stable. It has never crashed for me. Updating from zen 4.2 to zen 4.4.1 was problem free as well. As others have said, zen does not have a vast ocean of software in their netpkg repos, but what they have is up to date and works well. Zen uses lilo, which I have yet to figure out. I boot zen with grub from ubuntu. Also gaming is excellent. I play quake4, sauerbraten, and nexuiz just fine on my nvidia 6200.
I had Zen 3 running on several machines for a while last year, and really loved the OS. Lightning fast & after you get used to the "SlackWay" of doing things, pretty straightforward for the most part.
I gave up using it though, mainly because WiFi support wasn't that great at the time (Although it's probably improved now). I have since had a go (Several times) at installing 4.4.1 on my new laptop (Zepto 6615WD) but although it installs OK, it's soooo time-consuming to get it setup how i'd like it. The screen display is a basic 1024x768 when the Zepto has the ability to go 1680x1050, and there are a few other problems.
If it would install & configure as easily as Ubuntu then i'd probably run it as well as Ubuntu on this machine. I'm currently using Feisty though, and it's just soooo damn good i can't see me using anything else for a while. :)
But yeah, on the whole, i'd say that Zenwalk is "Wonderful" OS & well worth a try.
Same as Djinn. I have been using Feisty and it just rocks. Granted Zenwalk is faster in performance, I just find Ubuntu a bit easier with the upgrade path and ease of installing new softwares. Look for example at the ease of getting e17 on Ubuntu versus with Zenwalk or most other non-debian-based distributions.
I love Zenwalk! At times I'm frustrated by my own ignorance, but never the less it's on my ThinkPad right now...Thunar and everything else is very fast, Abiword does everything I need etc...But I'm using my MacBook with )SX as both my internet machine and productivity machine until I can work out the following:
Beyond that, I can handle everything on my own. Building apps from source, etc. is no problem, nor is retrieving dependencies as long as I have enough time (I became experienced in this when building and installing games like Super Tux).
If I only I knew what I were doing...
P.S. XFCE, in my opinion, is much better than GNOME and KDE. I have yet to find anything in GNOME that XFCE lacks, only XFCE is much faster and better looking. I'd like to make the buttons smaller, but I'll figure that out later. If I had to rank 'em, I'd say that XFCE just edges KDE and blows away GNOME. KDE is needlessly slow.
Zenwalk is really amazing dirstro i have ever used till now. Its stable very classy look and very trouble free to use. I always work on it, even though i have Ubuntu and Suse and crappy installed on my system.
Crappy=Windows. :lolflag:
I've recently switched to Zen, wanted to try anoter distro before moving on to feisty.
Getting a few problems where my laptop brightness shortcut would restart my xserver, finding info and installing additional alternatives doesn't feel as easy without synaptic and apt-get and ubuntuforums large database. I've jut barely started using so I don't really know yet how good or bad the package installer is, took me quite a while to find out where to get the necessary packages and dependencies for beryl, install it but it end up crashing often, and a few problems where it keep me from logging back in, I'll try to find out what's going on when I have the time, but it certainly isn't as easy as just doing apt-get update to get the latest svns like in ubuntu =)
So far it's a really fast and responsive os but getting what I need working and actually finding info and the solutions is harder than ubuntu, I found 100% of my problems and the solutions through just searching on ubuntuforum but I find it harder with zen, and google doesn't help that much, but I haven't really spent too much time with it so maybe I'm just not looking at the right place (wanted to jump right in so I kind of skipped a lot of texts)
Hopefully I'll solve the tiny problems since I'd really want to use zen for a bit, I really like how slim it is and I've liked xfce for a while, however I didn't feel it being that much faster than xubuntu other than the super fast boot time.
I have installed once, on my other partition, when Ubuntu abandoned me (yes, it did twice), but I couldn't figure out how to get my wireless dongle to work (and had no internet to get some info) and I eventually gave up on that distro. It looked nice, though, I might come back and try it in the future...
For madwifi this works a treat: http://support.zenwalk.org/index.php/topic,5189.0.html Regards stability, I've had panels & applets crash with beta versions of xfce, but since the final release it's been bomb proof, rock solid.
Tony.
http://www.osnews.com/story.php/18076/Zen-Yourself-Free-a-Windows-Defector-Discovers-ZenWalk/ Try this review on OSNews...;
;)
thanks for review CJ. i had zenwalk on my laptop for 6 months. i ran it for night and day, i used it to down-load flash vids and linux stuffs. never a problem. i loaned it to a friend, he didn't like it. so, he killed it, when he was trying to install win98(he asked to). he forgot to go the hp site for the drivers(like i recommended). i got this laptop from a friend(who is a G-man), he got it out of a dumpster. its cpu fan was packed full cat hair(lol) and the dvd drive was damaged. $100.00 and 5 days later i had it going:). it took me a week of trying all the windows;95,95full,98,982nd,me,2000 and xp. none worked. i tried Linux distros(many), and the Zenwalk, simply was the best choice. it was; out of the box, easy, fast and rock solid. i will repair the laptop soon and put old trusty Zenwalk back to work:D. alls good. note - i just realized something, my laptop ran cooler and longer w/ Zenwalk. interesting. hmmm..why?
I installed Zenwalk starting with the 4.2 version because Ubuntu failed on me several times and it was becomning more like Windows in more than one way, so I started searching for a true Linux and Slackware was the first I thought of... 6 CDs? Not for me... so I installed Zenwalk, and I don't regret it ! It's so stable, and after compiling a few apps I needed, I now compile about every package... I don't even use netpkg anymore! It's a great experience.
I loved my Zenwalk isntallation.. worked fantastic on my other desktop, and did everything i needed it to do.. sure i didn't have six photo managers, but i managed to survive ;)
ive been meaning to install a zenwalk core, and try and build up from there. I have been to the "core" forum at the zenwalk site and i have yet to see a anything explaining what all you need to add your own os etc. Is it as simple as netpkg openbox, and it will pull in X ? or do i need to know the name of the X package to install X, then install openbox?
jseiser said: ive been meaning to install a zenwalk core, and try and build up from there. I have been to the "core" forum at the zenwalk site and i have yet to see a anything explaining what all you need to add your own os etc. Is it as simple as netpkg openbox, and it will pull in X ? or do i need to know the name of the X package to install X, then install openbox?
Hi there, I installed from core, and yes, it's as simple as netpkg openbox, and it will pull down dependencies, including X. I would get SLiM for your login manager, and would have a serious think first as to what packages you really want.
Zen core 4.8 is literally just the Kernel, baseutils, and a couple of other things including the dev tools.
So, you get the chance to *really* custom build your distro.
Bonzodog, Is Zenwalk core any faster, or does it use fewer resources, than Zenwalk standard once you get Xorg and xfce running? Zenwalk standard is already pretty fast, and you can easily disable services you don't need in zenpanel or unload kernel modules in xkernelconf.
tommcd said: Bonzodog,
Is Zenwalk core any faster, or does it use fewer resources, than Zenwalk standard once you get Xorg and xfce running? Zenwalk standard is already pretty fast, and you can easily disable services you don't need in zenpanel or unload kernel modules in xkernelconf.
If you intend to use xfce, then no, zen core will not be any faster. Zen standard is very stripped back underneath it all. Zen core gives you a chance to really optimise the system is all. If you want to carry on with xfce, then stick to zen standard, and maybe use netpkg immediately after install to run through stuff you might not need. Like maybe the pcmcia utils and all the wireless progs if you have a desktop machine, etc.
Bonzodog, how does a minimal install of Ubuntu, adding whatever one needs, compare to a core install of Zenwalk, adding the exact same things, in terms of time and difficulty? I am not really interested in speed issues of the finished product (how fast and responsive the system is), but am wondering if doing a Zenwalk core install would take me longer and/or give me more headaches.
I'm mainly used to the debian way of doing things, though I have played very little before with rpm based distros and a tiny bit with zenwalk (until I broke my packege management system -- don't ask :-))
urukrama said: Bonzodog, how does a minimal install of Ubuntu, adding whatever one needs, compare to a core install of Zenwalk, adding the exact same things, in terms of time and difficulty? I am not really interested in speed issues of the finished product (how fast and responsive the system is), but am wondering if doing a Zenwalk core install would take me longer and/or give me more headaches.
I'm mainly used to the debian way of doing things, though I have played very little before with rpm based distros and a tiny bit with zenwalk (until I broke my package management system -- don't ask :-))
I find it easier personally - it took me two hours to custom build this system (45 minutes for install), the netpkg system is really easy to use from the CLI.
I started by adding X, which fetched all deps, then Openbox,obconf - now packaged for zenwalk - then got SLiM to handle login management, and then conky (no longer dependant on Audacious -yay!), and a few other apps as I went along. I then edited the inittab to boot into X, and I was flying. The network conf has a CLI curses front end, which is useful.
Thank you, bonzodog. I might give it a go next time I need to reinstall on a particular computer I have. Does Zenwalk have a decent graphical package manager (ala Synaptic)? I've used Zenwalk in the past (about 1 year ago), but its graphical package manager was pretty bad. CL is fine, but I like a GUI if I am searching for some package/application.
Netpkg has a GUI front end xnetpkg. It is simple and reliable. It's also easy to search with xnetpkg and read dependencies. Xnetpkg does not look as fancy as synaptic, but it gets the job done.
I put ZW5 beta on my older IBM X41subnotebook with 512mb ram and it's running like a champ so far. I love the fact that they include Wicd now. Wireless control is much better as a result.
I also put it on my main desktop dual booted with WinXP. I installed the Nvidia drivers and copied my xorg.conf from my working install of OpenSuse and all is fine so far. I'm going to test it out for awhile and see how it plays with wine, virtualbox and some other tools.
So far so good.
Zenwalk seems to be able to find the right balance between the best of performance and enough comfort for those not having the time or knowledge to build there system on Slackware. Great dist.
Just a reminder to everyone; Zenwalk has it's own channel on IRC, called #zenwalk. to join it, simply type, in the client,
/join #zenwalkI just upgraded my Zen to 5.0, and all I can say is wow. Best OS I've ever used! Too bad there aren't more packages.
The Zenwalk repos have grown a lot over the past year. When I first started with Zenwalk over a year ago there were very few extra packages beyond what came on the install disk. Now Zenwalk users have a choice between xfce, kde, gnome, and enlightenment desktop enviornments. There are packages available for just about anything you would ever want to with Zenwalk. There will never be anything near the 20,000+ packages available in the Debian/Ubuntu repos; but I really think the package list is adequate for most users. The Zenwalk packages, although fewer in number, are generally more up to date and less buggy than what is available in the Ubuntu repos. I think it is a question of quality over quantity. Compiling programs from source also tends to work better in Zenwalk than it does in Ubuntu.
tommcd said:
Compiling programs from source also tends to work better in Zenwalk than it does in Ubuntu.
True that.
I think Zenwalk is better than Xubuntu in performance and use.
Popoi said: I think Zenwalk is better than Xubuntu in performance and use.
Absolutely. Xubuntu doesn't really take advantage of Xfce's power - it is simply designed to be a low-resources GNOME. Zenwalk embraces Xfce.
cardinals_fan said: Absolutely. Xubuntu doesn't really take advantage of Xfce's power - it is simply designed to be a low-resources GNOME. Zenwalk embraces Xfce.
It's actually a fact that Zenwalk is used as the Xfce Dev's 'poster child' distro -- the xfce site screenshots use Zen desktops.
Be sure to check out the Zenwalk 5.2 beta. So far it is working pretty darn great. I had an issue with suspend on my laptop, but that has already been fixed with the newest snapshop updates. :guitar:
Really its a good option, lighter, with all codecs necesary, when i want show linux to any friend i use its live-cd.
But i recognize, his repositories are poor, so to uses diary, it's necessary know fairly about compiling
You really think the Zenwalk repos are poor? I think they have improved greatly over the 1.5 years I have been using Zen. When I first started with Zenwalk at version 4.0 there was hardly anything extra in the repos beyond what was on the CD. Today Zenwalk users can choose between XFCE, KDE, or Gnome. I think there is even an Enlightenment package somewhere. True, the Zenwalk repos will never be anywhere near as massive as Ubuntu or Debian, but there is a Zenwalk package available for just about anything you want to do with a PC. These days I get just about anything I need from the Zenwalk repos.
tommcd said: You really think the Zenwalk repos are poor? I think they have improved greatly over the 1.5 years I have been using Zen. When I first started with Zenwalk at version 4.0 there was hardly anything extra in the repos beyond what was on the CD. Today Zenwalk users can choose between XFCE, KDE, or Gnome. I think there is even an Enlightenment package somewhere.
True, the Zenwalk repos will never be anywhere near as massive as Ubuntu or Debian, but there is a Zenwalk package available for just about anything you want to do with a PC. These days I get just about anything I need from the Zenwalk repos. yeah, i compare with ubuntu repos, i'm talking about zenwalk 5.0, i had to compiling several programs, like audacity, when i've never had to compile nothing in ubuntu. Thats bad to noobs, but good if you like to learn.
jjgomera said: yeah, i compare with ubuntu repos, i'm talking about zenwalk 5.0, i had to compiling several programs, like audacity, when i've never had to compile nothing in ubuntu. Thats bad to noobs, but good if you like to learn.
But because Zenwalk is a Slackware-based system, it's very vanilla and compiling usually works fine.
I used Zenwalk 4 a while ago. I absolutely loved its speed, simplicity and the utilization of XFCE.
However, I had to remove it, Zenwalk 4 seemed to have no support for laptops what-so-ever at the time. No frequency scaling, acpi/apm control, proper fan control, etc. Making my laptop hot and noisy :(.
I am interested in trying out the 5.2 Beta of Zenwalk. Has anyone tried it on a laptop? If so, how good was the support for it (ie has it improved since Zenwalk 4).
Thanks.
A.I. BOT said: I used Zenwalk 4 a while ago. I absolutely loved its speed, simplicity and the utilization of XFCE.
However, I had to remove it, Zenwalk 4 seemed to have no support for laptops what-so-ever at the time. No frequency scaling, acpi/apm control, proper fan control, etc. Making my laptop hot and noisy :(.
I am interested in trying out the 5.2 Beta of Zenwalk. Has anyone tried it on a laptop? If so, how good was the support for it (ie has it improved since Zenwalk 4).
Thanks. You might as well wait for the 5.2 final - unless you want to help squash bugs, that is. Laptop support improves with each Zenwalk release, but the addition of HAL in 5.0 made a big difference for me.
Zenwalk 5.2 RC is out! Get it at http://download.zenwalk.org/people/jp/20080530/
cardinals_fan said: Zenwalk 5.2 RC is out! Get it at http://download.zenwalk.org/people/jp/20080530/
Nice find, I didn't see it announced on the forums... :popcorn:
Thats cool, I will have to update the laptop...
Antman said: Nice find, I didn't see it announced on the forums... :popcorn:
Subscribe to the mailing lists :)
cardinals_fan said: Subscribe to the mailing lists :)Guess I should have seen that coming. ;)
Antman said: Guess I should have seen that coming. ;)
I'm a *BSD user, what did you expect? :)
A possibly final iso is online at http://download.zenwalk.org/people/jp/20080606/zenwalk-5.2.iso
cardinals_fan said: A possibly final iso is online at http://download.zenwalk.org/people/jp/20080606/zenwalk-5.2.iso
Downloading it now, thanks.
I already know what applications I prefer for whatever task so I don't need to spend a lot of time setting up the system. Apt and Synaptic are fine applications, but I don't need them. Slackware and Zenwalk are exactly what I have been looking for in an operating system.
I've tried several distros on LiveCD. Of all of them, Zenwalk was the first distro that I failed to get a wired connection. That is my first test when trying out a new linux distro. Will stick with Hardy,Mint, or xubuntu!
Zenwalk *seems* like a great OS. I've tried it out a couple of times, but there's always a hiccup that leads me to have to learn a whole new way of doing things. My problem is I spent a lot of time familiarizing myself with Ubuntu--too much time. Now that I've invested all that time, I cannot afford to do it again with another OS. My latest attempt at installing Zenwalk, I had problems configuring samba so my 3 other machines could communicate with the Zenwalk machine. Then I noticed that Xfce compositing really slowed my system down (even though compiz ran really fast on the same machine with Ubuntu); lastly, for some reason the login to Zenwalk was screwed up: It booted me into a command prompt in which I was forced to login as root and run gdm just so I could login as a user. After a couple of days of trying to learn how to fix these issues in Zenwalk (in an unfamiliar environment compared to Ubuntu), I realized I was wasting my time and reinstalled Ubuntu. You have to understand I have a family and don't have much spare time to tinker with this kind of stuff. If I was single and had time to kill, I would've worked it through.
I'm not bashing Zenwalk, just stating that it's a bit of a difference if you're used to working in Ubuntu. If I started off my Linux experience with Zenwalk instead of Ubuntu, then I probably would have the opposite perspective.
My happy experiences with Zenwalk has lead me to try Vector Linux, but Vector has serious speed issues on my Dell desktop, so I will start playing with big daddy Slackware 12.1 and keep ZenWalk on my laptops.
Antman said: My happy experiences with Zenwalk has lead me to try Vector Linux, but Vector has serious speed issues on my Dell desktop
I will try some tips I got for the VL speed and Audio issues I have before I move on.:-k
You might be interested in this interview with JP Guillemin.