So begins another semester at University. And as I have decided will now be my custom, each Semester I will install a new distribution. Ideally, one that will support the needs of my subjects without too much additional fiddling. It would of course be possible for me to tweak a now familiar Ubuntu, but I was curious to see what other fish were out there in this wide, predominantly blue, sea.

On the technical side, both my courses would involve only basic C programming. Which doesn't really translate into a hefty 'requirements' list. My desires were thus:

Vim (7.0 preferred)
An ANSI C compiler
Not KDE-biased

And that's it, really. Which left my options wide open. Almost any 'heavy-weight' distro can be stripped down to these basics, and almost every lightweight distro comes with some version of Vim and gcc. So what's left?

Vision, that's what, attitude. Or something less concrete. An aura, a conviction, a desire to adhere to the Unix philosophy. Do one thing, and do it well. Something simple, yet functional. A thing of beauty, power and flexibility. Irrespective of any real meaning of the word - these are the sort of images that the word 'Zen' seems to conjure up, in the context of computing. So when contemplating which distribution I should try, the name 'Zenwalk Linux' slowly rolled from the back of my mind into active consideration.

Now I'd heard of Zenwalk before, but that is more or less where my familiarity ended. I had the vague idea that it was a light distribution good for older laptops. The Distrowatch summary indicated that it had vim 7.0 and gcc 3.4.6. Good enough for me! It also said that Zenwalk was formerly known Minislack, and, in fact, was Slackware based. That would make it the first time in two years that I have strayed from Debian based distributions.

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