Written by Steve Lake
Posted on: 04.04.2008 at 02:30pm
Section: Reviews
Zenwalk Linux is a Slackware-based distribution that has set a personal goal for itself to be one of the slimmest and fastest distributions out there. Their focus in this distribution is towards a strong graphical desktop and multimedia implementation. But how does Zenwalk perform? Is it ready for the new user, or is this a distribution for an eyecandy starved Linux hacker with time on their hands? Let's look and find out.
Install
When you first bootup the Zenwalk install CD, you're greeted with a simple boot prompt. While this might be a bit frightening for new users, a simple stroke of the return key will get you past this. It loads fairly quickly from this point and drops immediately into the Zenwalk setup screen. In this window is five options. Keymap, Partition, AutoInstall, Install, and Exit. Unless you're someone who likes to fiddle and tweak, AutoInstall is the best option here. While the installer is text based with a graphical installer appearance, there's very little interaction you need to perform to install Zenwalk onto your machine.
Just a space here, a few strokes of the return key there, and suddenly the installer is off on its own flashing through a bunch of screens installing a wide variety of applications and tools that you will need later. After about 10 minutes it asks you a few final questions that are very easy to answer, and most of which can be answered just by hitting return. Up to this point in the install it's been very user friendly, so a new user to Linux shouldn't be too intimidated by it. After you finish answering those questions, you're asked to remove the cd and then reboot by pressing ctrl-alt-del.
Now I find that a bit of a silly way to go and restart a distro given that most others just ask you to remove the cd and then hit return to reboot, which a few others kick out the cd and then reboot after a certain amount of time. It's not that big of a deal, but it does seem a bit odd. Anywho, the total install time was about 12 minutes, which is exceptional given that on an AthlonXP 2500, most distros take up to 30 minutes or more to install. Now, let's boot into the desktop and see what this distro has to offer.
The System
The first boot of Zenwalk is fairly uneventful. Just boot, wait for it to load, hit return twice to agree to two legal statements (one's the GPL, the other is one I'm not familiar with), select yes, and then a couple more returns and another yes, an ok, a couple of returns to agree to which sound card to use, select your region, set root's password, add a user (they ask a LOT of questions on this, so pay attention to every one of them), exit out of the user management screen, answer some weird numlock question, and then finally you're at the Zenwalk login screen. Whew! That's a lot of screens to answer on first boot!
Logging in is a snap though, and you're brought to a Zenwalk tailored XFCE desktop. Zenwalk uses XFCE 4.4.2 which runs lightning fast and completely flawless. For an OS that prides itself on being as simple and quick as possible, it does a pretty decent job of it. Although the XFCE interface might take a little getting used to for a new user. But a little exploring should reveal most of what's there fairly easily. Of course this assumes you have a lot of patience. This might be a turn off for some people, especially new users who want the simplest configuration setup possible. Since XFCE is built for speed, ease of configuration in certain areas had to be sacrificed.
Some areas make up for this with their uber simple configuration screens, but overall they either take too much away and leave you with too little, or you're stuck having to tweak behind the scenes to make certain things work, a feature that's friendlier to more experienced users, but not new users. Now if you're happy with the default configurations, then you have nothing to worry about. If not, you might hit a few problems.
Multimedia support is very good. DVD's and CD's just plug and play. MP3's play well too as do avi files, so Zenwalk does a good job on holding up their multimedia performance requirements they set out for themselves. There's also a TON of settings available to the end user, so if you're up for tweaking your user experience, there's a LOT of things you can tweak. Even your login screen. Yes, the login screen.
Wireless works decently, although I wasn't impressed with how it handed that. On top of that there's a LOT of tweaking and configuring you need to do to get it working. Now I might have just been trying to do things the hard way (I'm known for that from time to time), but if not, then configuring the wireless card requires a bit too much effort to get it working.
The system does very well with removable media. Pretty much everything I threw at it just worked, which is a good sign. The list of included applications is a bit thin, as stated above, given that the focus of speed required that they leave you with no choice in apps, except those they choose for you that they felt was best for the job and fastest. Now this is easy enough to circumvented with a nifty little software installer program called NetPkg. It's not as slick as Synaptic, but it does a pretty good job overall. You might have to poke around a few of the mirrors until you find one that works, but once you do, software installation is a breeze.
The desktop appearance itself is just beautiful. All the windows work well, and although you might have to tweak a bit to find a layout that works for you on some of them, it's really nothing major. The available themes and eyecandy are all really good. However, you won't find Compiz operating here since it would destroy the speed built into this distro in favor of extreme eyecandy. That's not to say you can't get it going, but it's not worth the effort and is a bit more of a pain than I would care to bother with.
Conclusion
Overall, I'd say that Zenwalk 5 is a good distribution, and it does meet its goals of speed, quality appearance and multimedia support. Where it fails though I think is in offering itself as a good distribution to the new user. I could be entirely wrong and new users might take to Zenwalk 5 like a duck to water. I don't have my usual guinea pig handy (my mom) so I'm going based on what I saw while reviewing this distro, so feel free to take my assessment of new user viability with a grain of salt if you like. But either way, I can't say I recommend this distribution for new users. However, I can recommend it to any user who's already gotten their feet thoroughly wet in the Linux world and is ready to tweak and tune, because Zenwalk 5 just feels perfect for that.
You can get more information on Zenwalk and download the latest ISO from their homepage.