Zenwalk Midi-Distro

[MU]

looks very promising.

Hey, they use Geany, too
http://download.zenwalk.org/i486/zenwal ... nwalk/xap/

Homepage:
http://www.zenwalk.org/

German article:
http://www.pro-linux.de/news/2006/9992.html

Mark

[Lobster]

It is very good Mark

I downloaded the live CD (sadly you can not easily install to HD from this) and have just installed the new 2.8 to hard disk (I wanted to use Python in an easy format)

I like it. It look great. It uses Slack - the most 'generic' of the Linux family.

The installation uses the slackware software, not hard for the avearage geek but not as smooth as Ubuntu or PClinuxOS, where the whole process is practically automatic.

It uses much the same software as Puppy.

[Sage]

Zenwalk is rather good, but. Many distros suffer from a most fundamental flaw - HD installations cannot be readily transferred between different HW. At best, users are presented with an incomprehensible CLI with inadequate explanation of what to do next, if anything. Not sure whether this is an oversight by developers or a throwback to the endemic arrogant attitude towards those not in the academic IT club. Even 'doze has a safemode. Fortunately, this is not a feature usually encountered with Puppy.

[Sage]

Upon revisiting Zenwalk with serial modem connected, I was horrified to discover that they don't have a proper dialer installed by default. The text-based pppsetup, for which there is neither any obvious reference nor any 'find' function, is a joke. It requires a fixed DNS for the ISP - they stopped doing that years ago, most are dynamically assigned and that doesn't appear to be an option. Some suggestions on their forum advise installing wvdial, for example, but this is another catch22 for most users as a second machine is required, and unspecified libraries have to be compiled/loaded, which is well-beyond the ability of most users.
The presentation is beautiful, mainly thanks to Xfce, but the distro seems to be the work of yet another bunch of disconnected academics caught in a time-warp of decades past and, unlike Barry, with zero vision of the real world and the real people that populate it.
Such a shame that folks like this should continue to frustrate the fantastic potential of the Linux movement.
Give it a miss!

[Lobster]

Just an update . . .
After installing . . . Python was not there as a default language . . . or maybe it was but I really wanted to run "Idle" the built in text editor. So even though Zen has Xfce and looks great as does Austrumi, it is not for me. The key here is long term usability.