1. Submitted by snvv, Monday 26th June 2006

I have try many different distros but Zeenwalk was the only distribution made me to swtich totally windows o linux. And I would like to make some comments about the review.
1.agree about cfdisk, Actually I used other liveCD with parter to partition the disk. After that the installation is strait forward and some or easier that other distribution.
2.In my case lilo is better than Grub just because I know (from pclinuxos) lilo better. And zen correctly detected win.
3.There is no package selection because of Zenwalk philosophy : one application for each task.
4.In my case networking was working out of the box, simillar as any other distro except Kanotix where it was disabled by design.
5.I use a xfce plugin to mount-unmount partitions. It is included in "add items to the panel"
6.Actually I use OOo (there is as download in the extras packages that can be reached within netpkg) and I must admit this is the first time that I can use efficiently OOo. In my PC's OOo under zenwalk runs faster than office suite in windows.
7.Java & flash are easily downloaded and installed even more easally.
8.I think most of the question in the forum are answered (I was helped many times there). Yes, some times there is no answer in the forum but may be there is no answer in general for (i.e) specific hardware software combination. This may be caused because Zenwalk is up to date regarding software - kernels etc.
9.About mounting CD i have to admit that this is the only un-resolved issue that I have. Automatically mount my UCS stick but I can not mount in an easy way my external CD-RW and never manage to burn a disk in it. Probably kb3 will solve the "problem" as other said but I havent tried it yet.
10.I have used synaptic (i.e in pclinuxos) and i can say that netpkg is no better or worse than synaptic. It does the job. It includes information for each package included etc. It has no grouping according tasks (i,e package for networking) but this is not problem. And yes the packages are limited but difficult you will find a task for witch there is no one application. Office application, graphics, flowchart, project management, etc are some of the application that I use from zenwalk repository and yes there are much more in sklackware repositories.
11.About automatic updates is just a "netpkg upgrade-all" or "netpkg upgrade-new" away and you have a fully updated system

In all other aspect I agree totally with your nice review.

2. Submitted by Anonymous, Tuesday 27th June 2006

My experience with Zenwalk is that it is simply a 686 optimized Slackware 10.2 with a slighty different installer in that it asks you to add users before reboot. Slackware is 486 capable out of the box. Zenwalk is really for slackers who want 686 optimized distribution. Hence very tight security settings for network, access to cdrom drives, etc. It remains very close to a 'do it yourself' distro, and delivers on the fundamental of slackware's KISS (e.g. keep it simple stupid). I think once you read this your own experience with Zenwalk will make some more sense to you. I also think it would have been nice for you to mention that Zenwalk is based upon slackware, one of our oldest gnu/linux distro's to which even SuSe has roots.

3. Submitted by Ram Sambamurthy, Thursday 6th July 2006

The reason for my installing ZenWalk was that there was an old machine (500 MHz, Pentium III) in the non-profit org that i volunteer in. While OpenSUSE was slow (maybe because of Gnome) on it, Zenwalk was very fast. I had also tried Ubuntu Dapper on the PC but it gave problems with the screen resolution. It was only able to go 640x480; I didn't like that. However, Zenwalk was perfect and ran without problems. The only problem was mounting the floppy. That was the biggest headache. What do you tell users when they find they cannot see the contents of a floppy? Even the mount devices toolbutton that I activated on the toolbar did not work. I would select the floppy but it would never mount. I had to do a "mount -t msdos blah blah" for the floppy mount to work.