Installation
The first thing I notices when booting up was it’s not a linux live CD, considering I’m used to installing Kubuntu it’s a change from having to wait and I love it no need to wait around booting up a Linux distrobution from your possibly slow CD drive, you just get a simple installation screen, you might say its a bad thing as you don’t get the option to chat on ‘AIM’ or play your games while your installing. It would be nice to see Ubuntu to have the option to install straight off the CD but I can’t see it happening anytime soon unfortunately but its a great way to give people a simple demo before they install the OS.
Now moving on to the options you get, there isn’t many options but what you get is amazing the main one I like is picking your file system like EXT2, EXT3, ReiserFS and XFS which is what I am currently installing, I cannot remember seeing this in many other flavours of Linux normally you get stuck with EXT3 which is a brilliant and a very advanced file system but ideally its not all that good for the low end machines in my opinion, you need all the speed you can grab and EXT3 doesn’t allow that when comparing to ReiserFS and XFS which you might notice XFS is the recommended one in Zen Walk for the better speed of it, the good thing about XFS is that its growing in popularity meaning it will get better and better!
After doing all the above you get to select your partitions which I am sorry to say I disliked, unlike other Linux flavours you get much better options in the department for partitioning your HDD with ease so be careful and I recommend you have a copy of partition magic next to you!
Another thing to pick on is selecting driver options such as SATA and PATA don’t know what PATA is?
Well PATA is Parallel Advanced Technology Attachments doesn’t help does it, but it’s also known as Enhanced IDE (E-IDE) which is also known as IDE; which luckely I learned about a week before installing so it’s not all that good for novice users, but then again it is based on slackware and as the saying goes most hackers are slackers. So try to remember that if you have a ribbon cable (40 Pins) its a PATA, and normally in red a very thin cable on HDDs it will normally have 4 Pins and that is your SATA HDD.