I have run a GNU/Linux system as my main operating system for a little while now. I started on Red Hat 6 back in ’99, but since then I’ve used Debian, Slackware, DSL, Knoppix, and others at various points. The latest has been Ubuntu. I picked up 7.04 and have been pretty satisfied since then. After marriage and a kid, I appreciated how simple Ubuntu was to set up. The default settings were livable, with a little tweaking.

Recently, I have started getting the itch again to tinker, and Ubuntu’s default setup is no longer satisfying me (nothing wrong with it, just not what I want). So after some deliberation, I am going back to a Slack-based distro: ZenWalk.

Installation

I grabbed the standard edition ISO and put it on a USB drive using UNetbootin. Before I booted into ZenWalk’s installer, I used gparted to shrink my existing Windows XP partition and create two new ext4 partitions, one for ZenWalk’s root (/) and one for my home directoy (/home).

ZenWalk’s installer is console-based rather than an X-based, and very simple. It gives you the option to change the keyboard layout, provides an opportunity to modify your partition table, and allows you to choose which partitions you want to install to, optionally spreading the system over several partitions. There is also an automatic option, where the installer makes the choices for you.

Since I was happy with the default keyboard layout (us), and had already partitioned my drive, I only needed to choose which partition was root and set up mount points for my other partitions. I started the installation and immediately hit a snag. Since I was installing from USB, I would need to mount the drive so ZenWalk could access the installation material. To mount the partition, I needed to be outside the installer. Usually you just use Alt-F2 to change to the second virtual terminal (or Ctrl-Alt-F2 if you are in an X session), but for some reason the ZenWalk installer was blocking that. I managed to get out of the installer and down to a command prompt. I was then able to mount the USB drive, but could not find a way to restart the installer (interestingly, I was able to access other virtual terminals after exiting the installer).

Rather than fight this longer, I burned the ISO to a CD and installed from the CD. The process up to that point was the same, and the installation proceeded without problems. Finally, after the system had been installed, there was the option to configure the LILO boot loader. GRUB had already been installed by Ubuntu so I chose to skip the LILO configuration and not to install LILO.

Configuring GRUB

Before I could boot into ZenWalk, I needed to add it to my GRUB configuration. GRUB was installed by Ubuntu and the configuration lived in the Ubuntu system, so I booted into Ubuntu. Ubuntu uses the newer GRUB 2, which allows the GRUB configuration process to be scripted. In GRUB Legacy, the boot menu configuration was usually found at /boot/grub/menu.lst. In GRUB 2, the actual configuration file is generated from several other files, located at /etc/grub.d. One of these scripts probes the machine for other installed operating systems. So in the end all I had to do was run

sudo update-grub

and restart. The GRUB scripts automatically detected the ZenWalk installation and added it to the boot list.

All in all, fairly painless. Other than a false start with the USB installer, no problems. While the default installation is pleasant, I plan to move away from the defaults a bit, but that is for later.