Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 -- fasten your damn seatbelts

Note: This entry was originally written on 11/26/07, but for some reason was never published. My recollection is that I was a little taken aback by the relatively long load times for Firefox in Wolvix when compared to other distros. I suspect that the "quicker" distros left pieces of the app in memory after Firefox was closed, resulting in a quicker second load. But I got over it because every thing else in Volvix is so good.

The original entry begins here:

Caitlyn Martin is right. Wolvix is screaming fast.

I'm working on my review of gOS, and in order to compare its Enlightenment window manager to something with Xfce, I decided to quickly throw Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 on the box. I probably should've installed Xubuntu Gutsy, but I've been wanting to try Wolvix for awhile, and I had the disc on the top of my teetering stack, beckoning to me.

Quick first impressions: Wolvix has a great control panel application. I opted for a traditional hard drive install, and the process was clear and concise -- yet complete. And did I forget to say quick?

The Wolvix installer even did all the GRUB work, putting gOS in the boot menu without me having to go into /boot/grub/menu.lst. (The fact that I can type the path out without a second thought means I've been in /boot/grub/menu.lst too many times lately).

I easily set my static IP in the Wolvix Control Panel. It's not a no-brainer, but if you've done it a couple of times in other distros, it's pretty easy.

Anyhow, I've had great things to say in the past about both Zenwalk and Vector -- the two big Slackware-based, Xfce-driven distros out there -- and Wolvix is right up there in terms of quickness. It may even be quicker. I'll have to throw Zenwalk or Vector on my spare partition to see how they run (it has been awhile in Linux time, meaning a couple of months).

Note: With my 256 MB of RAM, Wolvix didn't run very well as a live CD, but all that faded away once I installed to the hard drive. While both Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux run great on this box -- my converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client with VIA C3 Samuel CPU -- both as live CDs and in frugal and traditional installs, Wolvix runs so darn well once installed that I think it deserves to be right near the top of the heap when it comes to the most efficient Linux distributions out there.

I'm going to try Wolvix Cub on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt, 233 MHz Pentium II MMX, 64 MB RAM). That's not a box that can run OpenOffice or the GIMP, but if the even-lighter Cub version of Wolvix can boot on that box and install, I will be very interested in how it does.

I did have a system crash when logging out of Fluxbox and into Xfce. I'll have to see if there's any pattern there. And I was surprised to find that Firefox took quite a bit of time to load, even on repeat use, in Xfce. Something else to look into.

This is just a first impression of Wolvix; more later (and the huge gOS review, too).