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One of the big things that has been stopping me from completely switching to Linux has finally been remedied…I think. I was recently hired as a Flash Developer so I figured I should put my Flash game-face on. So with a sad heart I rebooted into Windows. After a few days of using Windows I was reminded of the reasons for which I’ve been trying to switch to Linux. Windows is just too darn slow for me. I know that defragmenting my drive and not running too many programs at once will help speed Windows up but I shouldn’t have to worry about those things. I shouldn’t be required to do all of those things just to get back what little speed Windows has to offer.

But back to the point of this post. I decided to do a quick search for an update on the Linux/Flash front. Come to find out some people at Codeweavers have gotten Flash 8 to work in Linux! I checked the screenshots that they offered and it looked to be legit. I read through the instructions of how to do it and within 5 minutes I had Flash 8 working in Linux. The speed doesn’t differ a whole lot from Windows. There are a few graphical glitches as far as some panels not wanting to close but everything else seems to work just fine. I tried some of my projects that I had written in Windows and they compile and run just fine under Linux. I’ll try to post more information about any other glitches that I find as I play with the program more in Linux.

Since I started using Linux around the turn of the century I’ve been constantly searching for a good distribution. I’ve needed it to be fast, stable, able to run the programs I need and it also had to sound good. I’ve gone through most all of the major distros: Red Hat/Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Suse, etc. Fedora is a good solid distribution, solid as in its packed to the brim full of applications and random other things that aren’t necessary for the average user to have. Debian is one of the most difficult ones for me to get set up, I always get errors with the networking during the installation process, and if an installation is going to be that difficult then the distro doesn’t even deserve my attention. Suse I used for a little bit, excellent hardware detection but as with Fedora, its too big. Ubuntu is the closest I’ve found to being perfect. Excellent hardware detection, good support, and an installation that even my grandma could handle. The only downfall I found with Ubuntu is that its just not fast enough. It takes a good minute to boot the OS up and get to the desktop. And as with Windows, after a while of use it just seems to slow down.

So what am I to do? None of the distros were good enough, so I had to keep going back to *shudders* Windows. I browsed around through a few distribution sites and came across the one distro that I had been a little scared to tamper with, Slackware. I read through the Slackware site and went through the installation manuals and found that it was totally different than any of the other distros I had tried. The only thing that was putting me off was that on one of the distribution sites it stated that the configuration files had to be edited by hand. I decided to give it a try anyway.

The installation was relatively painless. I only ran into one snag when it came to partitioning my drive. There were a few more packages to weed through than I would have liked but I kept pressing on. Once the installation was over I went through the routine Nvidia driver and software package installations. Once everything was said and done I came to the conclusion that Slacware was just a little too complex for me. It didn’t feel very pretty and it didn’t like to install things properly all the time. I came across quite a few packages that just wouldn’t install properly and I couldn’t find the dependencies in the package repositories on the internet. This sort of put me off. Just as I was about to go back to my usual distro, Ubuntu, I came across a Slackware based distribution. It’s name was Zenwalk.

The distribution lives up to it’s name. The installer didn’t even really need me there to get itself installed. I just gave it the proper names and pointed it in the right direction on my hard drive and it found its own way. No unnecessary packages were loaded, nothing bulky, nothing slow. It installed what was needed and only what was needed to get a smooth system up and running. Once Zenwalk was installed I was greeted by the usual gdm. I had to start off with XFCE as my window manager, but I was able to quickly install KDE using Zenwalk’s package handler, Netpkg. Netpkg is a nice little tool but it is very unorganized. The packages are just listed which is sort of annoying but if you look past that the application works very well. The Nvidia drivers that I needed installed without a hitch once I got the kernel sources installed. Everything just works, and it works fast. There is virtually no slowdown whatsoever regardless of what I’m doing. And it is a very stable distro. Zenwalk even managed to configure my sound card so that it sounds beautiful which is something that a lot of other distributions seem to have a problem doing. If anyone is looking to find a nice and smooth Linux distribution I would definately recommend Zenwalk.