Ubuntu 6.10

I decided to try Ubuntu after many months of doubt of whether it would be any good. As popular as this distribution is I found it to be everything everyone says it is. Aside from gnome being the window manager I found it easy to use and well maintained. I tried it on my notebook and even took it on a trip and used the live cd copy to use when I was in Las Vegas. My parents live there and while I was there I used their computer. I was able to get the full functionality out of it. Another reason I originally didn't like this distribution was that I was under the impression this was a Linspire Like distribution. In trying it my only disappointment was gnome. Its hardware recognition was incredible and it was very easy to use. I can see any new user taking this disk and getting full use out of Linux. One thing though i thought was weird was that when I installed to a VMWare bubble it didn't have you set a root password then I figured out later that they configured this distribution to not have root active that you have to reset password to get root and that normal administration tasks were done through Sudo. I didn't mind this but having used Linux for a while now I thought it odd that I didn't have a default root user available. I think however that anyone can use this distribution and get along just fine. I can certainly see why this distribution is so popular.

Zenwalk Linux

Recently discovered this little gem after watching distro watch new releases. Its light weight and well polished. The WM default is XFCE which leads you to believe its lightweight and good on older systems without major specs. Well it does! I ran this on a VMWare instance. with low ram and it ran great. I think however I will say that I didn't like that no games come pre-installed. This is probably a lame rant but I think this distro should include a basic game pack with the disk. Though downloading new software was made easy with the Package Manager that comes pre-installed. I really like this feature. This distro is based on Slackware so stability and simplicity is a must when I consider it being worthy of greatness. Again in this area it excelled. Overall I liked this distro and it will replace my Slackware systems shortly because of its ease of use. Another thing I liked was that it gave you the option at install whether you want to run in graphical or command line mode when install was complete. This was really handy. Once I install Slackware its one of the first things I change and its a pain to do so. Check out Zenwalk when you get a chance.