More Linux adventures
The laptop I use currently has Ultima Linux on it. I am not providing a link to the Ultima site because it's not there anymore. I have been told by the maintainer that it will be back, eventually. I am at least one version behind, and now have no means of getting the more recent version. It's also been my experience with this sort of thing that 'eventually' tends to become 'never' and so now I again look for a distribution to run on the laptop.
Zenwalk has a LiveCD, ZenLive. I tried it. I think it must be called Zen as it tends toward "guru meditation." The Cisco Aeronet card is something it complains about, never mind that it is known good. Even without the card, it's awkward as often the pointer seizes and there seems to be no activity, not even the CD spinning up, for several seconds. It's one thing to wait for the CD to spin up. It's another to wait for the system to realize it needs to spin up the CD.
Wolvix, on the other hand, seems like it is almost right. It comes up without complaint and seems to have almost everything I'd want or at least something close. I might prefer Nedit to the editor included, but at least that one understands tabbed windows, for example. I tried gtkam and after I told it what camera I had, I could snag images off of it over USB. While perhaps not useful on a LiveCD, slapt-get was there so getting packages should eventually be trivial.
There was no delay freezing the pointer, or if there was (I don't recall any significant delay), then the CD was spinning up right away and at least letting me know there was a reason to wait. Also, it's nice that Wolvix uses a subdued and relaxing dark gray default desktop background. Zen used something that made me feel like I was squinting at the sun
Wolvix does have some problems. One thing I don't care for is the prepending of Linux with GNU/ but at least Wolvix is a SLAX (and therefore Slackware) derivative so it's not as obnoxious about it as Debian derived stuff tends to be. The hardware issues are sound and wireless networking. Getting sound working is secondary as while it'd be nice, it's not really essential. Wireless networking is probably a matter of telling it use the right driver but I haven't dug into that yet. On the good side, wifi-radar is already there and should make switching networks less of a hassle and more reliable than that has been in my experience so far, once things start working.
I'm still only using Wolvix as a LiveCD. If I can get wireless working with it, it'll probably be caspian's new distribution. Overall it looks pretty good, but I'm still looking around too.