Uummm.. Team Zorin

That uummm... (loving kiss) is to the Zorin Team for bringing me a great 5.2 core release. Here is a brief testimony vis-a-vis my previous experience.

Past:
I've been using Linux for last 8 years. I've used RH, Mandy, *buntu, Arch, Debian and a couple other flavors mainly on all-intel desktops.

Problematic Present:
Couple of months ago I brought this Asus Eee PC 1215B, and the problems started merging. First I tried my good old debian squeeze. It was a fight with hotkeys (they did not work no matter what i did). Moved to PCLinuxOS 2011, Mandriva 11, Fedora 16, Chakra and Arch. There were more then one problem with each one - starting from graphics, to sleep/suspend, hotkeys, wifi/bth, etc. One one end, while Arch, Chakra and Debian were blazingly fast, hotkeys and graphics support was poor. On the other hand, Fedora 16 was too buggy. PCLinuxOS was somewhat better, but the system felt heavier.

Good times with Zorin:
Poor me, I did not tried Zorin earlier. Because, I thought Zorin is yet another Ubuntu. Oh boy, I was wrong. And thanks for proving me wrong. Out of despair I tried Zorin 5.2. To my surprise, it readily detected and configured every piece of hardware (including hotkeys) and seemed pretty fast compared to the number of packages and customization it adds on top of stock Ubuntu. Another good thing is it does power management better (i am unaware of the reasons though). The ondemand daemon setting works good.

A few minor problems:
1. First liveusb was not booting, it used to get stuck. After I put i8042.nopnp at the end of grub.cfg kernel line, the liveusb booted pretty well.
2. I pulled in fglrx drivers for my radeon hd 6250 card successfully, but xvba-va-drivers could not be installed from the preconfigured zorin/ubuntu repo. It was showing broken. No problem - I pulled the latest xvba-va-driver from oneieric repo. And that installed pretty well. Now the 2d/3d acceleration is superb.

Uummm Zorin Team. I am sure you will soon zoom into the linux centrestage.

Thanks and best wishes for the dev team and other members.

Hi manmath and welcome,

thanks for the feedback. Enjoy the ride!!.

Regards Wolfman

I became a fun of ZorinOS,love it very much!...too much
One more question:any idea when will be next release of ZorinOS LTS version? I disagree with a OS instaled at each new release.
Thanks for the future answer

I don't believe Zorin has LTS per se - it is following the Ubuntu releases, i.e., 3.x will be the LTS in line with 'buntu - ends mid 2013.

Ok,I understand...One more question:I know ZorinOS 5.2 is based on Ubuntu 11.04;my question is when will be a release of ZorinOS based on Ubuntu 11.10?
In the future,ZorinOS will use gnome 3(a stupid DE)?
Thanks again

Hi,

to the best of my knowledge, the next version of Zorin will be based on Ubuntu 12.04 which will have a 5 year support cycle!!.

(Yes I know it's Gnome 3 but I cannot do anything about it!! . By the time it comes out, Gnome.Org should have got rid of the bugs!!.)

Regards Wolfman

pretender: do keep in mind that gnome 3 is the underneath part of gnome...many associate gnome 3 with unity and the gnome 3 shell interface...
gnome 3 shell can be modified with extensions or it can be altered (which is the way ubuntu does unity and linux mint does it's new Cinnamon desktop)...
So, using either of those two approaches, Zorin can take Gnome 3 and customize the desktop experience to a more conventional one as Gnome 2 had...

I do find it strange though that in all this time, he hasn't posted any update on which direction he is going for Zorin 6...
Not to be too critical, i have found that this community is rather light in activity and it's developer does not give too much feedback to the community as far as changes, updates and the direction he is heading for with this distribution...Over at Linux Mint it is just the opposite...heavy community forum participation, activity and lots of interaction with Clem, the head developer of Mint...

I do understand what you are saying, swarf....but actually, Zorin really doesn't have too much choice in the matter...unless Zorin 5 is going to be the last of the line, so to speak...going forward, if he stays with gnome it has to be a form of gnome 3...KDE desktop wouldn't give you a windows look either...so, there is just no way he is going to be able to do an exact duplicate in gnome 3...he either has to employ Cinnamon or find some existing gnome slab menu that works in gnome 3 with an extension...

The only way he might duplicate the windows like menu is if he has the technical capabilities of creating it using a gnome 3 shell modification, much like Clem has designed the new menu that appears in Cinnamon, along with all the other functions in Cinnamon that make that what it is...It's pretty difficult and time consuming (it's a full time project with Clem)...so he would likely have to go more the "prepackage" route which means no way he is going to be able to do a windows 7 menu...

Gnome 2 is no longer being updated or supported...except for the MATE fork and it's future is kind of iffy quite frankly...and any distro's newer version now has gnome 3 and even debian itself is in the process of getting it too....so no way really to avoid a gnome 3 base....

Hi Craig,

take a look at what PinguyOS has done to Gnome 3 and he isn't even finished yet!!.

There will be many improvements to come (for both Zorin and other distro's), we will just have to be patient!!.

http://www.pinguyos.com/

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=pinguy

I would wait for the next version of Pinguy as it is almost time for a full OS upgrade to 12.04. (Pinguy is based on Ubuntu, just like Zorin is!!)

Zorin devs are holding back on a release because they want it to work correctly and not just throw out another coffee coaster!!.

I hope that the wait is worth it myself, I like everyone else will have to learn to use it too!!.

Regards Wolfman

Zorin devs are holding back on a release because they want it to work correctly and not just throw out another coffee coaster!!.

Wise words have been spoken.

Yes i see guys, verrrry interesting