On The Road with Vicky Lamburn

Oddly enough the two things I wish to write about are interlinked by one word. Zen. I’m sure most people will have come across it or heard of it, some may even think of Zen Buddhism but that isn’t the scope of this post. Instead I start with a ‘definition’ from Wikipedia which is quite nicely put:

Zen. ‘emphasis on mindful acceptance of the present moment, spontaneous action, and letting go of self-conscious, judgmental thinking‘

The two things are something I watched today and Zenwalk – a Linux distribution.

The first was roaming around for an hour late this afternoon before the sun went down again with my camera on Worthing beach. Today the weather has been pretty pleasant but I have to say that since the washed up timber came ashore here, today on the beach was pretty busy — people everywhere. I’m not really used to that in Worthing! I was talking to one chap from Newbury; quite a way to come to see tons of timber!

I was more concerned with the tide being in though and the kites being flown in Goring than anything else. It was a gorgeous sunset and the waves looked gorgeous with the winter sun twinkling off of them. The man I mentioned above when we were talking assumed I was looking towards all the timber stretching west when he realised I wasn’t looking at that at all. I was watching the sun literally go down.

We are fortunate that we get some fantastic sunsets here and today was no exception, the sky was filled with salmons, pinks, fuschias, mauves, lilacs, lemon yellows and lurid blues, the sun a scorching winter orange. It was most perfectly round watching it inch its way down – down – down – until it was subsumed beneath the horizon.

Watching the sun go down is so special and no matter how many times I watched it before it always enraptures me. Leaves me with great big stupid grin on my face! When I got back to the flat, looking west again the sky was a beautiful range of rich purples and deep reds. So so wonderful. It’s re-energising I find to stop and watch nature… Wonderful.

Zenwalk 5.0

In the past few days Zenwalk 5.0 has been released and this is a short overview. Since I have been using Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) I have been a bit disappointed compared to Feisty which seemed a much more solid and stable release. Instead 7.10 came with a number of problems which required some manual fixing for my Thinkpad T40.

Wireless performance was also worse. Sometimes Network Manager would loose access to the Keychain, and others the wireless card would plain not work. Of course all of this is an improvement on Windows where the Intel 2100B was useless. It still sucked though and still does as on my main laptop hard disk I am still using Ubuntu 7.10.

I’ve plugged in a spare 40GB drive though and installed Zenwalk as it appears to be a mix of the Xfce desktop (which I like), good solid Slackware foundations, Xorg 7.3 and Xrandr 1.2 and generally just a robust system. Wireless performance has so far been faultless. In fact I am rather enjoying taking Zenwalk 5 for a spin.

I’m using it now also!

Sleep and Hibernate work as they should, as does everything else come to think of it. Will I be using this over Ubuntu?

I don’t know yet, but I think it’s ‘possible’ as it is good so far. Everything feels very fast and slick. Everything works. In this day and age I have been using computers long enough to really not have much to complain about any of the three main desktop operating systems (Windows, Mac OS X and Linux distributions) — I am more bothered about them just working and me getting on with my work without undue hassle. In this respect they all do tha.

I’m tired of the usual tirades of operating system arguments. I’ve been using a computer since 1989, that’s almost 20 years now and really whatever OS I use, so long as it’s working — I really don’t care. What matters is that I have access to the web, a word processor, a text editor, a graphics editor, printer driver and some form of music jukebox and I am happy.

All of these operating systems do that. But I like Zenwalk so far because it does a good job of getting out of the way, and it just works. Like a beat workhorse (which is why I like Windows 2000 and XP.)

Check it out here: http://www.zenwalk.org/