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Zenwalk 4.0 - Comments

Monday 11th December 2006

Categories: Reviews, GNU/Linux, FLOSS

All comments not written by free-bees.co.uk are owned by the author, and free-bees.co.uk is in no way responsible for their content.

1. Submitted by Hyperion, Tuesday 12th December 2006

Hi,

Thanks for the nice review.

However, as I already explained in some papers/interviews : the installer will remain dialog based, for several reasons : reliability, simplicity, ability to run on any video card. Zenwalk is not a live CD.

Zenwalk installer is already known to be one of the easiest installers available for GNU Linux, and I won't add a jumping pink pony to make more "friendly". The installer is a program intended to be run only once : it is the technical part of the OS usage, so there's nothing wrong with ncurses imho, at least if it's simple, and it is.

A live CD is another story : the configuration steps are performed at each startup, so they should be mouse driven.

Anyway if our live CD version (Zenlive) include an installer in a future version, users can choose between the live CD "X based" installer (ala Ubuntu), or the real OS installer, the actual Zenwalk "dialog menu based graphical installer".

Regards

JP

2. Submitted by Mike, free-bees.co.uk, Tuesday 12th December 2006

In response to #1:

To clarify: my gripe with the installer is not the fact that it is dialog based. I have no qualms with that. My point is simply that, at some points, it is not as easy as it could be, especially partitioning. I'd be more than happy with a text installer so long as the new user can approach it easily.

3. Submitted by lackS, Friday 15th December 2006

You can select whether to enable cupsd or not during the installation process. It's part of a big list of deamons running (or not, as you select there :-) in the background.

There is no problem with swap, it's a problem with the installer. He tells every swap partition is active, but if you take a look into /etc/fstab, those swap partitions you didn't want to use are commented out.

Greetings,

lackS

4. Submitted by Sad Windows User, Saturday 30th December 2006

Even for a serial modem user, support for dial-up Internet connection is inexistent in many Linux distros. And Zenwalk seems to be no exception.

Unfortunately, even the famous "wvdial" dialer (the only that works) is not adequate because sensitive data like username and password are NOT encrypted... (Shame. Shame. Shame.)

The good news: Windows XP automatically detects all my hardware, including an ancient ISA 33.6kbps modem that NOT ONE SINGLE LINUX DISTRO has ever recognized. Did you undestand "why" so many people keep using Windows despite its bad quality?

Yes, I must do a sad statement: Linux is a FRAUD for us the dial-up Internet connection users!!!

:(

5. Submitted by Sally Kraus, Friday 17th August 2007

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