Zenserver 0.5 Released

Based on the Slackware version, the Zenwalk Linux distribution became quite notable among many Linux users mainly due to its multi-purpose usage and focus on Internet applications, multimedia and programming tools.

Today, after almost four months of hard coding, the Zenwalk Team is proud to announce the availability of a new distribution, the Zenserver 0.5, which has just been released. Based on the Zenwalk Core previous version and designed especially for servers, Zenserver(ZS) aims to be a reliable and easy to configure system. Even though the current 0.5 release is yet marginally beta, it is almost stable enough for production use. Zenserver was built upon the reliability and simplicity of Slackware and tries to follow the same Keep it simple! principle that Slackware was based on. ZS also maintains the tradition and uses modern and safe software, but it also has an unsupported set of standard LAMP packages.

Highlights:

- 2.6.19.7 kernel with GRSecurity patch
- PHP
- Mysql
- Bind
- Samba
- Postfix
- WebLua
- ZSAdmin for system management and administration

There are also other changes and additions. For example here, the default HTTPD would be Lighttpd and not Apache as in most other distributions. According to Teran McKinney, developer of ZS, they've went for Lighttpd as this is much faster and lighter. But Apache too can be used by those who are addicted to it. Zenserver's ZSAdmin-Lighttpd can configure Lighttpd to use different web scripting languages without a manual edit of the configuration file being necessary.

First called Minislack, Zenwalk makes use of a Linux 2.6 series kernel by default, unlike Slackware which comes with a 2.4 series kernel. The Zenwalk Project, which stands behind the creation and development of the Zenwalk series, aimed to create a lightweight Linux OS which should take in the latest software available for a stable release and to be optimized at the same time for a specific processor architecture ( i686 architecture, although it also supports i486 computers marginally) to increase execution speed.