Zenwalk 4.8 & Vector Linux 5.9 beta

This is both a review and a comparison. Vector and Zenwalk are both based on Slackware, and share a number of similarities. They are also in some respects quite different, which makes for an interesting comparison.

It may seem a little unfair reviewing a release level version against a beta. However, Zenwalk is under fairly constant development, and the review is based on a 4.8 install with all the latest updates, making it in many ways just as much a beta as Vector. This also illustrates the differences in the development model of each distribution.

Vector Linux 5.9 beta

Installing Vector is very similar to installing its parent. The Slackware install has always been text based, something that many reviews seem to feel is a failing. Personally, I don't think it can be counted as a failing. It is simple and should provide few problems for anyone, even someone who has not installed a Linux distribution in the past. There are not a great many choices that need to be made, following which the install will complete with little further user intervention.

The only part of the install that is liable to present problems is the partitioning stage. Vector offers a means of shrinking FAT or ext2 partitions to make room for the installation. It also offers cfdisk to create new partitions, and the ability to select from existing partitions. This step is always at least somewhat perilous, no matter what operating system is being installed. The options provided by Vector do at least cover pretty much all of the possibilities.

Keyboard layout is also selected early in the procedure, as is the locale (though that does not seem to be completely successfully implemented). Other choices involve the selection of groups of packages and also the choice of some individual packages. Once that is done, the main part of the install will proceed. The only other things that need to be done are to set up basic networking, set a root password, create a normal user account and install a boot loader. For the latter, the user is offered the choice of Lilo or Grub. Also (something I wish more distributions would offer), the user is given an option to skip installation of a boot loader.

After a reboot, the final stages of install are completed (setting up the sound drivers and selecting whether to boot to a console or direct to the X windows system).

My first impressions of Vector weren't entirely positive. I found the wallpaper a bit overpowering, and wasn't much taken with the desktop layout. Not to mention that the default mouse cursor set is both too large and too ornate. Still, there are few Linux distributions that come close to suiting me when set to default, and it wasn't too difficult to change things to suit my tastes.

The test machine I'm using is an IBM Thinkpad T40. Not exactly cutting edge hardware, but a reasonable performer and generally a very usable machine. This particular sample is somewhat modified, being fitted with an improved CPU, some extra memory, a new, fast Seagate hard drive and a new wifi card. Its maximum screen resolution of 1024 x 768 does tend to make me want to use the smallest available fonts and icons.

Vector uses the Xfce desktop environment as default, though it offers Fluxbox and some other small window managers for older machines. While I've had a quick look at the Fluxbox set-up, for the most part, I've used Xfce, since it provides a good combination of features and low system requirements (not to mention being the only desktop environment offered by a standard Zenwalk install).

Since Vector is designed with older machines in mind, some applications have been selected specifically to suit comparatively low spec machines. As an example, Abiword is installed, instead of the more common but much more resource hungry alternative of OpenOffice.org. A wide selection of web browsers is included (though some can be deselected during the install). Dillo, Firefox, Opera and Seamonkey are all available. Since my preferred browser is Seamonkey and I usually use its mail client for email, the choice wasn't difficult. I did install Opera just to see what it is like, but haven't done much with it so far.

Like most modern distributions, Vector provides some automounting facilities for removable devices. Unlike many others, it does not automount CDs or DVDs when they are inserted - they need to be mounted using the Xfce mount applet. USB devices are automounted, with two icons appearing on the desktop for each device - one of which opens the Thunar file manager, showing the contents of the device, the other providing a means for unmounting the device.

Special features

As well as the normal range of Linux applications, Vector comes with some special tools. These include VASM (the Vector Administration System Menu), which provides an interface to a number of system administration functions. This tool operates in two modes, standard user mode

and administrator mode. In normal user mode, it allows password changes, setting the default window manager and resetting user settings to the system default. In super user mode, it covers the majority of normal administrative tasks - autosetup of hardware, networking and GUI, user management, setting up startup services, network setup, hardware (keyboard, mouse, CD-ROM drives), file system (mount points, Lilo fdisk). While the interface isn't especially pretty, it does cover the majority of administrative tasks.

There are additional special tools such as Vlsmbmount, an interface for setting up Samba mountpoints and mounting shares from a Windows network. Vcpufreq provides control over CPU throttling for laptops and other machines

that support this type of function. And, finally, the most interesting one of all, which is in beta test with the 5.9 beta - Vlpackager

Vlpackager provides an interface to allow packages to be built using either standard source code packages or the Cruxports4Slackware system. It also allows existing packages to be modified. I've not had much luck building from raw source, but the interface to Cruxports works well. Hopefully problems with building from source will be sorted out soon.

Package Management

Vector uses slapt-get, with Gslapt as a graphical front end, for package management. Package format is similar to Slackware (a basic "tarball" format), but adds dependency checking, which is something that Slackware does not have.

It also uses the relatively new lzma archive format, providing much greater compression at the cost of somewhat slower extraction.

Gslapt is a long way from my favourite package manager. I find its display more than a little confusing, and have had a number of lockups in the 5.9 beta. On the other hand, its ability to transparently handle multiple repositories is a nice touch.

Documentation and Support

Vector Linux provides fairly extensive documentation on the install CD. The only complaint I would have about this is that it is a bit out of date, though that is probably not a fair criticism considering that 5.9 is still in early beta test.

Additional documentation can be found online in the Vector Wiki.

As with most open source projects, the most important source of support is the user forum. This provides a wide coverage of Vector related subjects, from which most users should be able to find help and answers to problems they encounter using Vector. While it is not the most active forum I've ever encountered, it is a useful and friendly place.

Useful Links

Vector Linux Home Page
Vector Linux Wiki
Vector Linux Support Forum

Zenwalk 4.8

Zenwalk (formerly Minislack) is based on Slackware. It is a single CD distribution, designed to be lightweight and fast. Unlike many other distributions, it does not offer a wide choice of software, providing a single application for each purpose. A growing online repository (and mirrors) provides extra choices once the install is complete.

The Zenwalk installation is clearly based on the Slackware install. It is text-based and both simple and quick. Basic choices of keyboard layout, time zone are combined with partitioning choices. There are no software choices offered - all packages on the CD are installed without prompting. Final choices cover install of Lilo, which, like Vector, can be skipped.

Once the system reboots, the X window system is configured, sound card detection is performed and the system goes to a graphical logon (the user is given the option of interrupting this step, should they want a console logon rather than a graphical one.

One thing that has changed in recent versions of the Zenwalk install is network configuration. In earlier versions, the user was prompted for basic network settings during the install. Now, network settings need to be established after the install has completed. While I can appreciate the desire to make the install simpler, I'm not in favour of this change. Too many newcomers are left wondering why they have no network connectivity at the end of the install. Even experienced users (speaking for myself, of course) can easily

forget that they need to configure the network once the system is up and running. The fact that the hostname and domain can be selected but will not be applied until the system is rebooted is also a bit of a pain. Personally I would much rather see this sort of configuration done during install, as is the case with just about every other operating system I've ever installed.

The only window manager/desktop environment provided by Zenwalk is Xfce, chosen for its relatively low resource requirements. This provides a clean and highly functional environment for the user. Default applications include Abiword for word processing, Gimp (naturally), along with Icedove and Iceweasel (forgive my cynicism, but I'm far from sure that there is any need to be quite this politically correct). Gnome baker is provided for CD/DVD burning (replacing Graveman, which was the standard in earlier versions, but which is no longer under development).

Zenwalk provides a clean and well integrated desktop, with good looking wallpaper. It is as fast as any Linux distribution I've ever used, and (in my experience at least) is very stable. One icon on the desktop is name "Mountpoint", which provides file manager access to mounted devices. The automout system is flexible and generally works well, though it does have one or two quirks. For instance, I've found that when I burn a CD, it is mounted even before it has been burnt, which is a bit confusing. Not a major problem...

Special tools

As seems to be the case with almost all newer Linux distributions, Zenwalk provides a number of special administrative tools. It also provides a common access point to them in Zenpanel.

This looks a great deal like the Settings Manager panel which is part of the Xfce desktop, though one annoying aspect of this is that the Xfce Settings Manager offers single-click access to the setup utilities it provides (which cannot be changed, so far as I'm aware), which Zenpanel requires a double-click for selections (and also cannot be changed), Personally I would prefer that both were double-click, but failing that, having both operate the same way would be a useful improvement.

Zenpanel has grown over the last few versions. It now provides access to Netpkg (the Zenwalk package manager), network setup tools, hostname and domain setup, a root access terminal, setup for startup services, a video configuration tool, language settings, time settings, date settings, keyboard layout settings, user management and a utility for naming mountpoints. All in all, a comprehensive set of utilities.

As well as Zenpanel, a utility for setting up Samba shares is also provided. This makes use of fusesmb, which provides one of the simplest ways of setting up remote shares that I've seen so far.

Package Management

As well as the standard Slackware package tools, Zenwalk provides Netpkg. This is a text mode utility which also has a graphical user interface available. It provides access to the Zenwalk repository and its mirrors, with the ability to filter file lists in a number of different ways and also provides search capabilities. It handles package dependencies, so the end user should not be left hunting for missing requirements for packages.

There are some areas where the console version operates differently to the graphical version. For instance, when requesting a package via the console version, the user is offered not only the ability to upgrade an already installed package, but also the ability to download it, for later installation. It would be nice if the graphical version offered the same option.

I'm not sure whether it is simply that I'm more used to Netpkg than I am to Gslapt, but I find Netpkg a much easier and more effective tool to use, even with the lack of functional consistency between the console and graphical versions.

One other facility provided by Netpkg which is worth noting is the "dotnew" function. This only exists in the console version, and is designed to provide the user with some control over how updates are done. When a package upgrade involves replacing a configuration file, using "netpkg dotnew" from a root terminal will prompt the user to replace change configuration files, with the ability to examine difference between the existing version and the new version, along with the ability to replace, skip or remove the new file. A useful level of control, though it can be easy to forget to run it after upgrading packages with Netpkg, which can sometimes have unfortunate effects.

Documentation and Support

Zenwalk has a good, up to date user manual, which is installed, but not available on the install CD prior to the install. There is also a Wiki with a great deal of useful information, and a support forum. The forum is more active than the Vector forum, but both provide helpful and friendly people to answer questions. Additionally, Zenwalk has a mailing list which tends to be quite active in the periods before a release.

Useful Links

Zenwalk Home Page
Zenwalk Wiki
Zenwalk Support Forum

Comparing the two distributions

In many ways, Vector and Zenwalk are similar. And in a number of important ways, they are quite different. The most notable difference is probably their focus. Vector aims to provide choices, where Zenwalk aims to provide a highly integrated operating system with a minimal level of choice.

It is fairly difficult to decide which is the best approach. There are a number of Linux distributions that provide so much choice it can be difficult to decide what application to use for any one purpose. Neither of these two distributions do that, but Vector certainly provides the end user with a number of choices which Zenwalk does not, or at least, does not without a good deal of work.

It seems to me that Zenwalk is a good deal better integrated than Vector, and this will probably be useful for many users, especially those that are new to Linux in general. From my own point of view, Vector saves me some work, since it allows me to chose several applications during install which I always end up installing on Zenwalk anyway. Seamonkey is the one that comes to mind particularly. I don't like Firefox/Thunderbird (or Iceweasel/Icedove as they are now being called), so I always end up hunting down the most recent copy of Seamonkey I can find and installing it. Vector provides this "out of the box", saving me some work.

One thing that I use my laptop for quite a bit is DVD playback. This is something that Vector can manage straight after install. While many distributions do not ship with tools like the libdvdcss libraries (needed for the majority of commercial DVDs), Vector does. It also installs Xine as standard. This means that DVD playback is available straight after installation.

Zenwalk does not ship with either libdvdread or libdvdcss. They are available, and can be installed. It does come with Mplayer for multimedia playback (which I'm told includes the necessary DVD support). Unfortunately, Mplayer is useless when it comes to playing DVDs which include menus (which covers the vast majority of commercial DVDs. Even though recent versions of GMplayer (an alternate front-end for Mplayer) has an option to play DVDs with menus, it has never worked for me. As a result, I must always end up hunting down an alternate player. Normally this would be Xine, since it works well for me. Another place where I need extra steps to get Zenwalk to work the way I need it to.

Both distributions provide a number of custom tools to make setting up and administering the system easier. Of the two, Zenwalks' are a good deal more professional looking, and in some areas at least, work better. Even so, the fact that both provide such tools is very useful, especially to those new to Linux. In favour of the Vector tools, they are somewhat better grouped, so the user is less likely to have to jump to multiple different places to get normal system administration tasks completed.

Both distributions are moving towards using HAL for automounting removable peripherals. At the moment,however, the Zenwalk automounting scheme is a good deal more coherent than what is provided by Vector. I must also admit that I prefer having a common place to look for peripheral mount points, instead of having icons plastered on the desktop. That is a personal preference, and the operating mode will presumably change when Zenwalk moves to HAL.

Another area which affects me personally and would probably not affect many others is in file system support. Zenwalk, in its efforts to keep size to a minimum, provides a kernel with limited support for alternate file systems. As a long term OS/2 user, I need HPFS and JFS file support, of which Zenwalk only provides the latter. In real terms, due to some compatibility problems between the Linux and OS/2 versions of JFS, HPFS support is more useful to me than JFS support. With Zenwalk, I must either compile a custom kernel or recompile the kernel modules to add HPFS support. While this isn't a major problem, it saves me considerable time that Vector, like the majority of other Linux distributions, includes the HPFS modules in its stock kernel. While I might still be inclined to compile my own kernel, it is not something I need to do, as it is with Zenwalk.

The development model that the two distributions use is quite different. Vector Linux 5.8 was release towards the end of 2006, and 5.9 is only now going into beta testing. Zenwalk seems to maintain around 4 months between releases. While both distributions provide updated packages quite quickly, Zenwalk makes complete releases much more rapidly. Also, while both distributions provide up to date packages, Zenwalk tends to be much closer to the cutting edge. As an example, it moved to libata support as soon as it became part of the kernel structure, while Vector is still preserving backward compatibility using the older IDE drivers. Given the amount of problems that have been caused by libata reacting to various chipsets, I would have to suspect that the Vector approach is better for its users.

Another aspect of Zenwalk's rapid development is that in at least some instances, things are changed which seem to have little need to change, and often those changes do not lead to much if any improvements in the user experience. In particular, the changes from Zenwalk 4.6.1 to 4.8 seem fairly minimal, and in some instances at least, things that used to work no longer work correctly in 4.8. I find this too reminiscent of Mandrake/Mandrivia, which always seemed to be able to fix one thing while breaking several others. In earlier Zenwalk upgrades there were positive steps forward without steps back, but that unfortunately cannot be said of the upgrade from 4.6.1 to 4.8.

The existence of 4.6.1 illustrates another area in which Zenwalk is not ideal. Testing cycles seem to me to be altogether too rushed. While some bugs will inevitably slip through even the most rigorous of testing cycles, all too often, Zenwalk releases are made before people testing them have had the time to test them fully. I cannot see any need for so much pressure to get releases out. In the case of version 4.8, a security hole has been introduced which did not exist in earlier versions, but fixing it was put off until 5.0 is released. Personally I think there would be good grounds for making the testing period of any release longer, since this would allow people a much greater chance of finding problems of this sort and of getting them fixed before general releases are made.

For all the rapid development that Zenwalk undergoes, it has lagged rather badly in one area at least. WiFi support under Zenwalk is still very much up to the user. My test machine has an Atheros-based wireless card. This card has native Linux support. Under Zenwalk, I need to compile the MadWifi package and install it. Under Vector, the card is detected and the driver loaded on boot.. While neither distribution provides the easiest of wireless setup, Vector is certainly winning in this area. at present.

Vector Linux seems to have its package maintenance rather better organised than is the case with Zenwalk. As an example, Vector is supplied with Samba version 3.0.26a, while the Zenwalk repositories have only got 3.0.21c available. There are a number of other examples of packages which seem to have fallen by the wayside. Some means of keeping up with package maintainers and finding replacements for those that drop packages or leave the packaging team is badly needed. I'm not sure how Vector organises this, but they seem to be doing it significantly better than Zenwalk at the moment.

Conclusions

As a long-term OS/2 user, I first moved towards Linux looking for a replacement for an operating system which IBM has abandoned and which no longer gets any real development in either the operating system or applications. Since I first tried Linux in the later '90's, I've used quite a few different distributions. I started with Red Hat, tried Mandrake, SuSE, Slackware, Debian, Ubuntu and a number of others. In the end, I seemed to be doing what a number of other Linux users do - hopping from one distribution to another in the hopes of finding one that suits me.

I first used Zenwalk almost 2 years ago. And found that it provided me with just about everything I could ask for in terms of replacing OS/2 as my normal operating environment. Since then, while I have tried a few other distributions, I have not been even vaguely inclined to switch,

and at least one of my machines has been running Zenwalk ever since. Not to mention the fact that since then, I have spent much more time running Linux than I have running OS/2. While I have at least one machine which will probably continue to run OS/2 for a long time, most of my day to day work is now done under Linux, using Zenwalk.

After looking closely at both of these distributions, I still prefer Zenwalk. But I would not find it all that hard to switch to Vector, since it is both closely comparable and in some respects at least, more suited to my use. Indeed, recent developments in Zenwalk have prompted me to look at alternatives, little though I want to. If what I see as less than useful developments in Zenwalk continue (the current 'snapshot' version is almost unusable for me on my laptop), I will be looking very seriously at moving to Vector full time.

Both are fine distributions. Their roots in Slackware give them both a number of strengths. These include the BSD style init scripts (which I personally find easier to understand than the more common System V init scripts). Use of Xfce as the main desktop environment helps keep

them responsive, while providing a pleasant working environment. Both have a good selection of useful applications as well as good coverage of extra applications in their repositories.

They have quite different philosophies - Vector aiming to provide maximum choice for users while Zenwalk attempts to cover all requirements with a minimum of confusing choices. It is difficult to say which is the better approach, but I remain slightly more attached to Zenwalk for its tighter integration and more coherent approach. I just hope it can learn a few lessons from Vector and add things such as improved wireless support in the near future.

Paul Marwick

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