Tuesday, August 04, 2009

Installed Zenwalk 6 on EeePC 901

Finally got around to installing Zenwalk on the EeePC. I've used ZW a lot before and like it because it's lite and can be fast. Indeed, because of it's speed it might be ideally suited to Netbooks such as I'm using but doesn't seem to be much promoted in this regard.
However, I did have some extraordinary difficulties in getting this to work the largest of which was probably that after installing the Gnome version of ZW 5.2, I just couldn't get a wired network connection.
Another important point that I discovered over the last few days is that when using Unetbootin, it's always best to re-format the USB-key before burning the iso to the key. failure to do this may provide a usb-key full of garbage that won't boot.
Once I got the usb-key ready, the install took quite a long time (maybe 45 minutes) as details regarding every package being installed are displayed, perhaps needlessly, on the screen.
Getting it to boot was just a matter of copying the vmlinuz-x.y.z file from Zenwalk's /boot folder to /boot/zenwalk in Ubuntu (whose Grub is in the mbr). Note that Zenwalk, as of now anyway, doesn't use a initrd file. After modifying Ubuntu's /boot/grub/menu.lst file appropriately, Zenwalk booted without problems.
This time it booted up with a network connection. One nice thing about Zenwalk, in contrast to Ubuntu and several other distros, it's very easy in the Network Manager package to keep DHCP while changing DNS servers to the OpenDNS servers.
Extraordinarily, I failed to get a working version of Opera installed and posted about it to the ZW forum where more details (and maybe even a solution later on) are available.

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