Every Linux fan has his or her own favorite Linux distro. I find Zenwalk to be one of best distributions I have come across. I have tried many other distributions like Ubuntu, Arch, etc. but didn’t quite like them. They are great, but they are not for me. Zenwalk is based on Slackware. In other words, it is a cool and handsome version of Slackware. Zenwalk brings the stability and reliability of Slackware to the desktop.
Zenwalk 6.0 Standard Edition, the latest stable version, was released on 3/21/2009. It comes with Xfce 4.6, a lightweight yet complete desktop environment and the 2.6.28.7 kernel. The latest stable version has better USB web cam support and the Netpkg component has also been vastly improved.
Zenwalk Linux provides a good mix of features with low memory usage. The default installation installs almost all commonly used software. One of the greatest plus points of Zenwalk is that it works reasonable fast even of many older hardware. The official minimum requirements are Pentium-3 or better and 128 megabytes of RAM. However, Zenwalk can be comfortably be run on even older hardware but it may be a bit slow.
Zenwalk comes with well-configured init scripts and real time input/output scheduler. Due to these, Zenwalk has much faster boot times. The installation is also very fast. On modest hardware, it takes about 20 minutes to install.
One of the new features of the current version is OpenOffice. Earlier versions featured GNOME Office. Only the base version of OpenOffice comes with the Zenwalk CD. However, required addons can be downloaded and installed easily using Netpkg. The latest version also has Mplayer and Exaile in place of Totem.
Netpkg, the software packaging tool that comes with Zenwalk, has been significantly improved in the latest version. It is now capable of managing “orphaned dependencies”. It is true that Netpkg lacks the functional capabilities of other package managers. However, the latest version has many improvements over earlier versions and I hope the coming versions will get even better. Netpkg is one of plus-points of Zenwalk.
The latest version of Zenwalk is available in four versions: Standard, Core, Live and GNOME Edition. There is also a version called ZenEdu. The Standard version will cater to almost all the users’ needed. However, if you want to built your system from the ground, try the Core Edition. If you want to test Zenwalk without installing anything, try the Live Edition.
To download Zenwalk visit www.ZenWalk.org