I'm going to try Zenwalk but would like to know of any downsides compared to other distros before I do. General question I know, list anything you can think of.

My computer is AMD64 wireless laptop.

When I tried an older version of zw on my laptop I could not make the wireless netgear card work, but that was a while ago. I love zw on my desktop and have found no drawbacks. It's fast and dependable.

If you love slackware then you will love the speed and flexibility of Zenwalk. Slackware is great but I needed something quick and easy for my laptop(but not to easy that it hides things from you).

Main thing that I can think of is that unlike certain distros (and Windows), if you make an error it doesn't tell you. It just doesn't do what you wanted to do. For that reason it is often better to run certain programmes from a terminal. then you do get some indication of what you did wrong. Especially straight after install.

However, Zenwalk is without doubt the best Distro i have ever tried and it is getting better with every release (unlike some I could mention).

I have it installed on a Sony Vaio with wifi and WXGA screen and everything looks and runs great.

This is a never ending discussion. Everyone who wants to test Zenwalk should test zenwalk. Everyone has other reasons to use or not to use a distribution.

So, stop talking, start installing Zenwalk. :-)

What was your procedure for enabling wifi?

My laptop has an internal Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG card so i downloaded the firmware from here:

http://hollywoodb.fileburst.com/zenwalk/ipwfirmware/

and extracted it to

/lib/firmware

and then started wifi-radar (you have to be root) and it was sorted easy-peasy!

I used version 3 firmware but apparently some people have had probelms with that and need to use V2.4.

Guess I need to find the prismgt firmware. Thanks!

I'm amazed at how great this distro worked with my Thinkpad R40. Most other distros that worked "out of the box" were so bloated that I could only stand it for a few weeks. Zenwalk did the trick for me. I don't think in the last 6 years that I've been using Linux have I ever taken to a new distro so quickly.

I agree 100%, like everything it has its negative points but I think it is going to go a long way. I first started using Zenwalk as I needed something light for an old PC. However, it is a mistake to just think of Zenwalk a minimalist distro for old hardware. With a high spec PC you can make it look very, very impressive indeed. I used to use SUSE 10.1 on my Sony Vaio and the screen resolution was markedly inferior to Windows XP. With Zenwalk the opposite is true, I am constantly amazed just how good this distro is.

netpkg froze up on me. The only way I could close it was to hard reboot the computer. And no Open Office.
Internet didn't work at first but it was VERY easy to figure out where the problem was. Ubuntu on the other hand....

It's in the repositories. I installed it last week, but surprisingly found that I had grown to prefer Abiword and Gnumeric. But if you need OOo, it's here.

Thanks for the info
AbiWord can't save .doc (microsoft Word files) can it? That's the only reason I want Open Office. Most of my school work (Westwood Online) has to be submitted in .doc files.

Yes, Abiword saves as Microsoft Word (.doc). You should test to see how well it works.

thoughts after working with Zenwalk for 1.79 ish days

Netpkg is about as buggy (in different ways though) as openSuse 10.1's Was when 1st released. Netpkg keeps crashing, do 2 at a time to be stable . . .

the Network config is useless, unless you have 1 ethernet card only. Forget wifi added in there (I can't figure out how to add it in - had to write a shell script)

I did not know better on 1st install, NUM LOCK SUX on notebooks, Don't do it. Something is very buggy, and it will not disable even after updates.

Ok, here is a wine for my cheese.
To change the time I actually had to do date -s <hour:minutes>
I could not change the time by clicking on it.

Now.
It is MUCH faster then openSuSE 10.1 on my old Athlon 4 laptop. While I don't have all my favotite "tools" - it's a different distro - I'm over it. I did install Midnight commander though from there updater.

Still playing, but I have alot of work to do, so play time is over. i still can not use if for what I need as my Suse laptop is nice and stable, still trying to figure out Zenwalk.

Also - this is in general to all distros I tried

TAPPING SUCKS!!! Friends don't let friends use tapping . . . I need to figure out how the heck to disable this in Zanwalk, but that is for later.