Hi again,
Was just back to report that I was able to run beta2 overnight on Z60m without a freeze when I turned off screensavers.

But as there is a new plan I guess this doesn't really matter any more. Beta 3 is sounding a bit experimental so far? So maybe I will wait and see what further reports come in before trying to d/l especially as downloads have become really tricky here.

what if you boot on the intel system *without* any additional boot parameters?
Does it work? Please confirm.


Regarding the installer, I'll test and if this has problems I'll disable the installer function.

Please expect an RC soon.

First RC is out (fixed a bug in the installer):



http://zenwalk.pinguix.com/user-account ... -6.4RC.iso
http://zenwalk.pinguix.com/user-account ... -6.4RC.md5

All the intel drivers give me direct X and there is no problem there.
Whit and without boot parametres.
Whit the modeset in /etc/modprobe.d as you did
Mine is a secondary problem.

Thank you guys for all the testing! You helped a lot to get ZL polished.
The Release Candidate is out, and some remaining bugs were fixed. We are very close to the final release.

Hi Zenwalkuser,

I just tested the RC in my working place and its working fine. The problem here is, When I used Ubuntu Live, while shutting down, the cd used to come out then paving a way to shutdown. But I couldnt find that mechanism here.
Also, in the Zenwalk fully installed system I could see the shutdown script run in the screen, but in live I didnt find it.
Anyways, the display part and application part is nice. Also, the internet gets configured automatically and I am very very happy about that. It helps me to use Live CD in some private net centres which helps me in avoiding the hacking hazards.

I will try the LIVE CD in my home today and report if I found anything weird. My system is having a very old architecture and I hope it works fine.

Anyways, All the best.
Thank you,


With regards,
-ajaykumar

Greeting,

I am new to linux, just 2 months of going around and trying various distros.
My first success is LinuxMint, and Puppy, then several others. In fact i turned a very old laptop with celeron 1.3G (win XP will just crawl) into a simple media player and gave to a person who is in late 50 without any computer experience, and she is using it for watching movies plus listening to talking bibles, thanks to fast and small footprint offered on Puppy.

I read from elsewhere about Zenwalk, read a bit, and decided to try ZenLive CD. for a simple reasons i had a lot of trouble on any distros that does not have a live CD and sometime when i installed my old OS 'disappeared'.
I was hoping for better user interface than Puppy and yet faster than LinuxMint so that i can turn some older computers to give them a new life.

So i started downloading this iso, first time, it download well, after long time, it completed BUT gave me an error that it cannot be written to disk ( not exact wording but similar meaning), it left me with no alternative but reloading.
Second time, it downloads fine and after more than 1.5 hour i checked and it said completed successfully. So i burned ISO and found out that it has serious error, its size is only 58xM. yet download said successful.
So i went for third time, and finally this one worked.
Before anyone question me on download procedure, alright, nevermind, this is not the first time i download iso file, i think it is about 70-80 times already, some iso download lasted 6-10 hours without any error. and for those 70-80 i recalled some 3-4 errors and the rest all worked.
too bad this time around 2 out of 3 downloads failed.

for testing on this ZenLive 6.4RC, i tried on four different computers, there are
1. Old Compaq Desktop with P4, 2.4G CPU , 1.2G Ram. wired SIS900 NIC
2. Old Laptop with celeron 1.8G CPU and 840M Ram, wireless intel NIC.
3. somewhat new desktop intel i3 2.93G with 4G Ram, and a broadcom 57788 rev01 wired gigabit NIC
4. 1.5 year old laptop with intel centrino2 , 2.9G with 4G Ram, broadcom wireless gigabit NIC

my test is simple usage: internet surfing, youtube, play movie files by accessing local network for movie files.

here is some test data, hopefully it is useful

1. Live CD runs OK, automatically get internet access via wired NIC, then i use network share, found the network computer that host files, get access to them. Youtube worked.
Problem encounter: use default mplayer, some rmvb files can be played, sound and video are both OK,
but some rmvb files could not start playing. other files in MP4, mkv , flv file could not play.
so decided to install vlc player ( which played all my files in other distros well). results after some long downloading, installation completed, however, it does not play any file.
did it one more time, uninstalled all vlc and dependencies, reinstall, successful, yet cannot play any file.

2. Live CD runs OK, use wicd , key in password for wireless access point, and connected internet OK, surfing ok, try to test youtube, the moment i click "Youtube-Broadcast yourself" , the browser shudown.
movie file playing, same issue as item 1.
so install vlc with all dependencies files, installed successfully, yet, it cannot play any file.

3. Live CD loaded OK, stuck with unable to get internet. so nothing further on testing.
Can anyone help with BCM57788 gigabit NIC?

4. Live CD runs OK, use wicd to key in password for wireless network, connect fine,
internet surfing OK, then use network share to get movie files, worked OK.
problem encountered:
No sound.
during shutdown, hang after displaying
Disabling IRQ #17
Disabling IRQ # 19

i need some help on how to get vlc working to play all those files i normally played, perhaps i did not install properly,
but doing it three time on two computers lead to same problems.
also this is first time i use Zenwalk so i might be clicking using old method from windows and other linux that might not work on zenwalk??
thanks for reading. any help appreciated.

I have some problem to understand what you did. So my answers maybe are not
what you expect.
1-"...i had a lot of trouble on any distros that does not have a live CD and sometime when i installed my old OS 'disappeared'"
When you install a Linux distro you are prompt from the installer to choose a partition. If you don't have made a new partition for the new distro the installer will format what he found and the old OS will disappear.
2-The Linux kernel automatically load the drivers (module) for your computers at boot. The problem is that all that computers where made for Windows and sometime there is not a module or has to be load later or has to be configured. So each computer will behave different in Linux and this is the major problem that face a Linux user.
3-You did install VLC. How?
If you did install in the live cd means that is running in RAM.
Or you did install the old live-cd ?
Anyway, for legal problems, Linux distros normally don't come whit the codecs pre-installed. You have to install them in a second moment.
Whit netpkg go to a restricted repository and install them.(libdvdcss-lame ..)
Then you need some extra gst-plugins. The easy way is to install Sounconverter whit all the deps. Now both Totem(media player) and VLC should work.
I will try to install the normal Zenwalk 6.4 in your old Compaq.
I don't know if you have space.
You can use gparted or cfdisk(inside zen installer-cd at "partition hard drive")
In the wiki and in the manual you will find how.
#If you have a disk that could be "sacrificed" to zenwalk just use
"automatically install"
You will find
current repositories
snapshot """"
restricted
Do not use snaphot.

hi franco, thanks for your reply.

1- OK point taken
2- OK point taken

3-You did install VLC. How?
I use NetpKg , follow Zenwalk manual to install vlc and its deps when i am running Live CD.

If you did install in the live cd means that is running in RAM.
Or you did install the old live-cd ?
I used this latest ZenLive 6.4RC and use live testing.

Anyway, for legal problems, Linux distros normally don't come whit the codecs pre-installed. You have to install them in a second moment.
Whit netpkg go to a restricted repository and install them.(libdvdcss-lame ..)
Then you need some extra gst-plugins. The easy way is to install Sounconverter whit all the deps. Now both Totem(media player) and VLC should work.
ok point taken,
##by the way i happen to tried salix 13.1.1 and find that it has one click install all codec.
## and after i installed codec, i can play any file format without any problem. very simple , to me a new learner.

I will try to install the normal Zenwalk 6.4 in your old Compaq.
I don't know if you have space.
You can use gparted or cfdisk(inside zen installer-cd at "partition hard drive")
In the wiki and in the manual you will find how.

yes i have some 10G space, i used gparted and give 10G partition to Zenwalk
so i did the installation of Zenwalk 6.4. to old compaq computer,
after install, my problem is i find lilo does something different to my existing Linux OS that are using Grub2.
i tried a few times, when asked to choose 1,2,3 of boot loader, i tried 1 ( using Linux)
when reboot, the computer just have old linux OSes and Zenwalk did not appear as one selection in the Grub2 menu.

as such i still do not know how to make Zenwalk 'bootable' after it is installed in one partition.

any help is appreciated.

You have to boot into one of your other (linux) OSs.
From there you have to edit the grub menu to include zenwalk. I am not very farmiliar with grub, so I'm not sure how to do it, but search a little online (or try man grub) and it will maybe turn up some answers.
The zenwalk wiki has a howto on setting up grub2, if I remember corectly...

I'm sorry that I can't give more specific instruction, I am on my mobile device and it isn't so easy to search for answers. If your problem isn't solved by the time I am on a real computer, I will try to help more.

just for the moment boot zenwalk whit the install cd
at the boot prompt write
ata root=/dev/sda* rdinit= ro
where * is the number of partition where you did install zenwalk.
If you like Zenwalk you can always try to configure lilo or install grub.
I have only zenwalk in my system and I'm not expert in this stuff.
Anyway probably the easy way is to install grub2 and os-prober
If you run in problems installing grub, (read the wiki!)come back for help
somebody else will help you.
Last- I did note in a previous post some problems installing vlc. If after installing VLC the ap does not work try to install also qt.
I download vlc-1.1.3 from a snapshot repo and I have qt-4.6.2

hello HER0_01 and franco
thanks for your help.
i decided to forget about existing Linux OS just to try out Zenwalk.

so i use ZenLive 6.4RC DVD and run install. choose YES to write MBR.
after installation to compaq computer, boot and Ok i have Zenwalk.

Then i went to restricted site for the two files franco mentioned, oh, it took far too long to get it
many sites are not responding... eventually one restricted site responded and got it installed.
then i look for vlc from snaphot site and install vlc 1.1.2, it took very long to download, much much longer than when i did with Puppy.
Finally, upon reboot, the computer can now play those files i tried, mkv,mp4,rmbv by vlc player.
so a quick summary is : it takes a lot longer to get this work on my typical computer usage.
i hope the running speed is much faster...
after playing for a while to see how the response, i plan to try installing another Linux OS with grub boot loader to see if it will accommodate Zenwalk.

thanks again on your helps.

I tested for the first time now, and all seems to work what I normally use. I have ati x1250 graphics.
Good job

Thanks for all the testing and for sharing your experience with ZenLive-6,4-RC.

@stillborn

I am proud to get positive feedback from YOU as one of the Salix Devs.

So I guess we are ready to release the final?

HIi, just a feedback, not a show stopper.
i read chinese, and use it regularly.

using Zenwalk installed, the Chinese fonts read from website looks like below:
ppfilm电影，万部正版免费在线点播电影；最新精彩的预告片抢先登陆；中国高清的电影视频门户；网友最佳选择的电影门户, ppfilm电影播放器!
近期热门排行榜 - 少女特工队 - 绝代艳后 - 美国丽人

and it is not as nice as some other distros, you can see its graphics are not even in size.
thanks for reading