| Zenwalk-4.2 |
| Friday, 12 January 2007 | |||||
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If anyone needs a Linux desktop which is fast on a pentium 3 machine with ram less than 256mb, Zenwalk-4.2 is one of the clear candidates. Yeah, you can also opt for Xubuntu, fluxbuntu, etc. Slackware-based Zenwalk was previously known as Minislack. It is ranked at number 14 at DistroWatch.com. This shows that Zenwalk has garnered lots of respect from the community !
For this Zenwalk-4.2 review , i used a 2-3 years old Dell Inspiron 600m notebook powered by a Pentium M processor with cpu speed of 1.40 Ghz. The SDRAM was 256mb(266Mhz). For your information I had intentionally reduced the ram in order to see how well Zenwalk-4.2 compensate this 'memory-challenged machine'. The built-in graphic card was ATI Radeon 9000 with 32Mb dedicated memory. The reason I didn't choose a pentium 3 machine because i was eager to see how well Zenwalk-4.2 handle my notebook's centrino component.
The last release of Zenwalk was version 4.0. It was released on 20th november 2006 with Linux kernel 2.6.18. This time, the latest Zenwalk version 4.2 was released on 6th january 2007. Zenwalk-4.2 comes with Linux kernel 2.6.18.6 and Xorg-7.1.1 and many updated packages.
The installation started with the usual format of zenwalk or slackware tradition. Partitioning of harddisk is easier in this version as the Zenwalk-4.2 installer let you choose a few partitioning layout that may suit your needs. Xfs was chosen as the default as it is a fast filesystem.
I took 15-20 minutes to install Zenwalk-4.2 on my Dell600m notebook. Installation was very smooth, just like slackware. The graphic card and the AC97' soundcard were readily recognized. No problem with the broadcom ethernet card either. However, Zenwalk-4.2 didn't see my intel pro wireless adapter(of ipw2100). Well this is one reason why i like ubuntu. Ubuntu's support for various wireless adapter amazes me.
After the installation is completed, i managed to boot up Zenwalk-4.2 within 40 seconds. That's fast. Unfortunately, when i tried to log into XFCE4(which is the default) for the first time, i was told that my password was incorrect. Oh, i remember, i wrongly chose 'on the NumLock' during the last few steps of installation earlier on. Not a big problem.
The first thing i did when i logged into Zenwalk-4.2 was to fire up the Mplayer. It couldn't play my DVD movie. So, I quickly fire up the new Zenpanel to download libdvdcss from one of the official repository already listed in the Netpkg program.
Oh no ! The Mplayer crashed after a few seconds of playing the dvd movie and wouldn't spring up again. The easy way out was just downloading and installing Gxine from the repository and all went well after that. Luckily it took me just a few minutes to download Gxine as compared to more than 30 minutes for Mplayer.
Next, i checked out if this GNU-Linux desktop operating system was capable of playing MP3 songs or not. The result was good ! Audacious played my MIchael Bolton song out-of-the-box. This simple looking media player resembled winamp and xmms alot. Other file formats supported by Audacious are wma, wav, ogg, and MPEG4 audio.
Coming back to the reason why i tried Zenwalk-4.2. It is the speed. It's lightweight. Its known secret (XFCE4). Starting almost anything in this environment was a breeze, really! The other reason was, to test the new Zenpanel.
I easily disabled the NumLock service that i accidentally switched on during the installation of zenwalk via the 'Starting Services' option in Zenpanel. Network settings option is also found on Zenpanel where it is actually just the front-end of the Networkconfig tool, that let you setup network in the blink of an eye !
Besides 'Starting Services' and 'Network Setting' options in the new Zenpanel, the other components are 'Netpkg', 'Video configuration', 'User management' and etc.
By the way, before i used Zenpanel's 'Network Setting' tool to configure my intel wireless adapter, i had to configure my broadcom ethernet card so that i could go to http://ipw2100.sourceforge.net to download the ipw2100-fw-1.3.tgz package. This firmware package had to be extracted and copied to the /lib/firmware subdirectory in order for you to enjoy wifi. Ndiswrapper was also included, just in case you need to use the windows wifi driver.
To test the wifi connection, i disconnected the existing ethernet connection. The wifi connection to the wifi router was up within minutes with the help of the Zenpanel's 'Network Setting' option.
My euphoria didn't last long. I couldn't enjoy flash-based website with the firefox 2.0. To make matters worse, there was no flash-plugin in the repository. Come on, even ubuntu ppc also has the 'slow' swf package on its repository.
On the application side, you have Abiword, Gnumeric, Gaim, Thunderbird and Mousepad text editor. I like the lightning fast Thunar file-manager. Frankly speaking, i don't mind not having nautilus or konqueror.
To sum it up, i am satisfied with Zenwalk-4.2 's performance. It's fast. But wifi card support is definitely a let down especially with the abundance of centrino machines these days. It's a pity if one cannot enjoy flash over the net. Kudos to the developers, you can easily download fluxbox if XFCE isn't fast enough or is still bogging down your system. It took me just a few minutes to download fluxbox from the official repository. I tried it, and it was even faster !
Thank you for reading my review.
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By Michael Shee Choon Beng.
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