Zenwalk Frustrations and a Mini Review

From fighting with Zenwalk I'm at my limits... The drivers tricks don't seem to cut it for me and the lack of network connectivity via wireless is preventing me from installing the Intel 915 resolution packages. I really want to have Zenwalk work to do a comprehensive review on it, but it just doesn't seem like it's happening. I am somewhat at a loss as my parent's wireless router is not in the most accessible place where I can do a direct connect via LAN cable.

From booting the LiveCD, it's a pretty quick process. Though unfortunately, it is plagued with the log-in prompt on booting to the GDM Log-in manager.

Type 'one' to log-in

This could have been done away with as it isn't really intuitive to have the machine with a LiveCD to be waiting on the user to log-in. It's somewhat of a showstopper if you have to even log-in. Though in the manual, they say that the passcode of 'ZenLive' is required to do any root level privileges. The weird fact is that if you log in with the ID/password combination of ZenLive/ZenLive... all of the Thunar windows have a warning that you are the root super-user and to take care of what you do in Zenwalk. Maybe it's a personal thing, but I feel that a LiveCD shouldn't require passwords just to do simple things like install software to test out.

i have a fondness to how quick the system is. This is based on the fact that they use XFCE as the desktop environment and in combination with the principle of one-app-per-purpose. There are basic functionality applications installed and the presentation looks great (Zero's note: It would be far better if I could get proper widescreen resolution). It's not hard to see how Zenwalk gets its reputation as a quick but minimal distribution.

My big gripe is the lack of inclusion for the Intel Wireless Pro 2200 chipset for wireless networking. There is a claim saying that it's a proprietary driver that requires firmware to operate, yet there is a Sourceforge project that works and quite possibly implemented in distributions like Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora/Red Hat. If it was something like the inclusion of NDISwrapper, I could understand... but the last I remembered was Intel supported open source development! Maybe there's more to the picture that I don't understand... I hope to get some functionality up to retest out Zenwalk and do a much more substantial review.