failing like never before

Review: Zenwalk 4.6

I had some pretty high hopes for Zenwalk 4.6, but I experienced one very strange problem.

Installation was fine. There weren't any fancy animations or graphics like Ubuntu, just a simple text-based installer. It was a pretty basic and simple installation.

After installing the OS, I rebooted the computer and was presented with a little menu of which OS I would like to boot into. Unfortuently, there were only two options, Windows and Zenwalk. So apparently the automatic bootloader installation option I had choosen while installing Zenwalk didn't work so great, because it didn't find my Fedora partition. This wasn't too big of a deal since I figured it would be pretty easy to fix later on, but it was a bit irksome. I selected Zenwalk, and it procceeded to boot.

I got some lines of text scrolling by, and then the screen went black and stayed that way for the next ten minutes and refused to respond to any keystrokes. I tried a hard reboot and got the same problem twice, whereupon I decided to reinstall the OS which didn't help either. This was the real problem. It wasn't like X crashed and then Zenwalk reverted back to a command line, I can handle that. Zenwalk died. It didn't give me any error messages or any way of fixing the problem.

Granted, I don't know everything there is to know about linux but I'm quite sure I didn't screw up the installation, after all, there wasn't much to screw up. I'm going to try reinstalling it again later on today and see if I can do anything to make it work.

If I cannot get Zenwalk to run, then I'm going to try to use Elive