Ever tried Zen computing?

Oct 8, 2007 11:06 GMT  ·  By

Zenwalk now got to version 4.8, after some release-candidates, which led to a very stable edition. This is the fastest version ever created by the development team, as the testers say.

Zenwalk 4.8 will be equipped with a 2.6.22.9 Linux kernel, that has a new wireless stack, tickless clock and 1000 Hz scheduler for better reactivity while lowering power consumption, a good solution for laptops.

IceWeasel and IceDove, the GNU License version equivalents of Firefox and Thunderbird will be replacing them from now on. Zenwalk is installed with Firefox and Thunderbird support, so that all applications work with IceWeasel and IceDove.

Video/Xorg auto-configuration has been modified to support widescreen monitors as well as to provide full features for Synaptics touchpads. You will be glad to see the new desktop artwork, as well as the new boosplash.

Audacious has been removed, but you can find it in the "Extra" repository, all its functionality is now handled by other pieces of software, like GMusicBrowser (the jukebox), Streamtuner (the stream browser) and G-MPlayer (the multimedia player), each of these programs being specialized in a different area.

GMusicBrowser is an application that helps you categorize your music collection, edit tags, normalize filenames and browse thousands of files easily.

In the "Extra" repository, you will find around 1000 packages, like KDE 3.5.8, Gnome 2.18.3, OpenOffice 2.3.0 and many other packages and language packs.

As the developers say, Zenwalk Linux is a GNU/Linux operating system that has the following traits:

■ Modern and user-friendly - by using the latest stable software and selected applications. ■ Fast - because it's optimized for performance capabilities ■ Rational - it uses one mainstream application for each task. ■ Complete - it is a full development/desktop/multimedia environment ■ Evolutionary - Zenwalk uses a simple network package management tool called netpkg.

If you want to install Zenwalk GNU/Linux, then you should have at least a Pentium III class processor, a 128 Mb RAM and 2GB of free space on your hard disk.

You can download Zenwalk 4.8 right now from Softpedia.