Since coming back to school, the install of XP on my laptop has gone to pot. I can’t log in as admin. Thats as good as gone as far as I’m concerned. Imagine not being able to su to root in Gentoo (on your box mind you, not cracking!)? Think of all the things you couldn’t do? Well that’s what happened to my XP so its gone. That install of XP was less than a year old, that’s what pisses me off the most. It usually takes me at least 2 years to ruin an XP install.
With that in mind I decided to trash Windows totally and just go all Linux. Which means I now need a distribution for my laptop. After a bit of thought on the topic I decided to go binary. With the number one complaint about Gentoo being the compile times and my laptop being in the neighborhood of 4 years old, that sounded like a valid complaint. My first choice for binary distros has always been Slackware. I use SLAX (for now) as my live-cd why not have its parent distro go on my laptop. The only problem with that was I wanted a 2.6.xx kernel, so I went looking for a slack derivative that could get the job done for me. The first one I found that I felt suited my needs was Zenwalk Linux. It got the job done actually, I won’t lie to you. It did everything I needed it to do. I did not stick with it though. My biggest issue with it was its package manager. It still feels very “beta” and the selection of packages they have for you is small to say the least. It basically boils down to if its not on your install CD, then its probably not in the online repository. That really bothered me. I would like a larger selection of hardware. The next thing that bothered me was it more or less forced me into using XFCE. I have no problems with XFCE, its very nice, but its not my bag. I have my favorites and XCFE isn’t one of them. Between the two of those I gave up. I’m going to have to go with something else. I will note though that Zenwalk is an excellent distribution, if they continue on the track they appear to be on, don’t be surprised if I try it again some day or even whole heatedly recommend it to other people. I liked it a lot, but for now its just not for me.