Zenwalk 5.2 ... hello old friend

While rummaging through some old CD's I stumbled upon a Zenwalk 4.2 labeled one, which reminded me that last year I really liked that distro, but due to some BIOS problem on my laptop, it didn't behave the way I liked.

Now, a year later, I was willing to give Zenwalk another try.

Since last year both my laptop and Zenwalk have evolved. I flashed my BIOS with the latests version available on the HP site and Zenwalk has reached the 5.2 milestone.

I did the test on my HP Compaq nx6325 without a wired Internet connection.

Installation
I booted the newly burned CD, selected the appropriate UK keyboard and let Zenwalk take over my whole hardisk. The installation went smoothly, root password and user account, Lilo, localization 'Nl-Be (Dutch)', UTC clock, acknowledging some copyright issues... all went smoothly in less that 15 minutes.

The whole install process is very simple and gets good marks for that.

Wireless
Once in the XFCE environment, I needed to get my Broadcom 4312 wifi card alive so I could update the system. As the box is a laptop I always simulate it having no wired Internet connection so it's always a big question whether the distro provides the needed tools out of the box, allowing me to connect to my Wifi router.

First I copied the Windows driver files (bcmwl5.inf and bcmwl5.sys) from a thumb stick in a folder. Then comes the fun part: do I need to go into a terminal and use ndiswrapper or is there a GUI driven way.

Much to my surprise I found a utility 'WICD' that allowed me to install the BCM4312 Windows drivers. The ndisgtk utility allowed me to load the BCM4312 Windows drivers. I then rebooted, came back to the WICD-utility and could specify my Wifi settings and WEP security key . That was very easy. Again very good marks.

Documentation
Now that I could go on line, I visited the Zenwalk website and checked the documentation, because I wanted to get my system up to date.
I quickly landed on the Zenwalk Documentation page where I found the Zenwalk manual (translated in Dutch). It is a small but fairly complete manual mostly aimed towards the beginning Zenwalk user.

The Wiki OTOH is aimed towards the user that has a running basic Zenwalk system, and wants to tweak and hack so to get more out the system. It is basically an English Wiki but French, German, Italian, Polish, Hungarian and Spanish translations are available.

Updating and Package Management
The manual has a section dedicated to Package Management and everything was clearly outlined and explained. Following those guidelines my system was updated using netPkg.
Good points scored again.

Up to now I was pleasantly surprised with Zenwalk 5.2.

How complete is the distro out of the box?
Zenwalk comes with a rather interesting package of programs. Abiword, GNumeric, Gimp, Iceweasel, Icedove, Thunar, Brasero, mPlayer, Streamtuner, Pidgin, Transmission, ... . Basically you have everything on hand for word processing, spreadsheets, image manipulation, browsing, email, file management, CD/DVD burning, multimedia playing, instant messaging, torrent downloads, ... but no games ??

I added openOffice and Acrobat reader using netPkg but could not find the MS-fonts (arial, times new roman, ...). Maybe they are named differently.

Edit 2008/10/16:
There is a thread on the Zenwalk forum about installing MS-Fonts:
http://support.zenwalk.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=11440

All in all a good and complete set of software and knowing the size of the openOffice package, it is sensible to leave it out.

Multimedia.
Out of the box I could play MP3, Ogg and Flac, view wmv and avi, play DVD's, rip audio CD's, ... Once again a fairly complete set of tools are available for the most common multimedia uses.

Conclusion

Zenwalk 5.2 is a refreshing wind blowing in distro world.

Coming from an all KDE environment (PCLinuxOS) and experiencing XFCE for the first time, Zenwalk has not deceived me at all. I encountered no show-stoppers, was able to get everything up and running, noticed a nice and busy forum...
Of course, I still need to get the hang of XFCE and look into the wiki in order to tweak it a bit more, but it's all part of getting to know the lady.

Zenwalk 5.2 has replaced PCLinuxOS on my laptop and is there to stay. Don't worry Tex, I still run PCLinuxOS on my desktop :-)