Some may call me a distromaniac but, hey, I know I can’t resist the urge to purge an old computer and violate a few processors with a new flavor of *nix. I’ve committed to them all in the past - Red Hat, Mandrake, FreeBSD, Debian, Knoppix, Mepis, Slackware, SUSE, and Ubuntu to name a few. But, like a swinger, I always cheated and ditched them for something else.

Recently I went into a distro binge and downloaded all the most popular ISO’s. I obsessed with Distrowatch.com and saw fit to track down any that looked suitable for my old clapped out PIII 633 machine. I tried all the mini’s and even tried some of the bigger kitchen sink variety distros.

I was wanting something lean mean and not too bad on the eye. When all the smoke had cleared and the hard drive was feeling a bit flaccid, I chose to enter a relationship with Zenwalk 5.0. I know, I shouldn’t commit, I should have learned my lesson but, I just couldn’t help it.

The install was fairly standard and painless, not really worth much of a mention. I’d recommend that you download the live version first and give the distro a good test run. The live version is true to the actual install. One bummer was a lack of install to HDD on the live version.

First off, I liked the philosophy of Zenwalk - simplicity. A single package per task or issue. Following this simplicity was an easy package manager - netpkg when I needed or wanted something not included in the original install. They’ve thrown in a nice netpkg gui but I find that the CLI is much quicker and facilitates my lazy streak. It also is built on off a slackware platform and I have always been fond of slack and it’s speed. Zenwalk’s new you beaut HAL makes plug-n-play a breeze which is important now-a-days.

As a photographer I was initiially disappointed when I plugged in a digital camera and nothing happened. I was hoping HAL would kick in and allow me to browse or download my photos. Alas, a quick “netpkg digiKAM” fixed up that problem pretty quick and so now I’m good to go with the camera.

My verdict after the honeymoon?? It runs a little slower than what I think it should. I was expecting a slack derivative to still look beautiful the morning after but she does have a few bags under the eyes. Nevertheless, I still like her. She’s stable, good looking and easy to maintain. All in all … I’m still turned on and haven’t strayed once!

Before running off, I should mention that the documentation, wiki, support and forums for Zenwalk are very good. I noticed on some of the distros that there was little tolerance or responses to questions in forums … not so with Zenwalk. Good documentation and good support makes me very happy.

Here’s my screen shot of Zenwalk 5.0 with Gimp and a terminal on the desktop. I’m running the standard Xfce with the bottom panel removed. I like the right click access to apps and it leaves more area on my small old fashioned monitor. The wallpaper is one of the standards in the /usr/share/wallpaper/ directory.