Saturday, June 23, 2007

Zenwalk Linux

Zenwalk Linux is a light but useful Linux distribution related to slackware. In recent years I have tried every distro imaginable (Mandrake, RedHat, Fedora, SuSE, DSL, etc) but the only 2 that ever seem to work well are ZenWalk and SuSE. And though SuSE is great for a great many things, it is rather bulky and not the best for performance.

Zenwalk can be downloaded here.

I had to resize my Windows XP NTFS partition to make room to install ZenWalk. To do this I used the GPartEd Live CD found here.

Installation is smooth and fast.

The hard part was getting my ATI RADEON 9600 video card to work with acceleration. I had to dig around the net to find how to get it to work. The secret ultimately was that if you install the ATI proprietary drivers and they don't work, you have to uninstall them for the default driver to work with any form of accelartion. Better yet, buy an NVIDIA video card.

The default apps were plenty. I installed Eternal Lands(my latest game addiction). I also installed samba and smb4k. smb4k also installed some kde packages. It allows me to use a GUI to browse and mount windows machines on my local network. I added openoffice too.

Fast, stable, effective. Just what every user really needs.

Next I am going to play with installing StarCraft on Wine. Yum. Or maybe I should say netpkg.