14 DAY TRIAL // The developers of the Slackware-based Zenwalk GNU/Linux operating system announced this weekend the general availability of the first and probably the last RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Zenwalk 8.0 distro.
During the past four months, Zenwalk 8.0 has received a total of three Beta releases, and now it has finally reached the RC state, as most of the issues have been fixed by now. Moreover, the development cycle of the Slackware 14.2 operating system is nearing its final stages as the second Release Candidate was announced the other day.
"Following the Slackware hopefully final release candidate, here we are for Zenwalk 8.0 RC1," said the Zenwalk developers in the release announcement. "Many upstream bugfixes. Many improvements in Zenwalk system tools to handle per-user settings like locale or http proxy."
Zenwalk 8.0 is coming very soon
So, as you can see, Zenwalk 8.0 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) has received approximately the same software update and security patches that were made available upstream, in the Slackware repos. Among them are Linux kernel 4.4.7, Samba 4.4.2, Subversion 1.9.3, Chromium 49.0.2623.112, LibreOffice 5.1.2, FFMpeg 3.0.1, as well as MPlayer 1.3.
Another interesting change that landed in the first RC build of Zenwalk 8.0 is support for the Chromium web browser to save passwords, as the GNOME Keyring app is correctly initialized during the startup of the Xfce desktop environment. Other than that, there's now support for Logitech wireless keyboards.
You can download the Zenwalk 8.0 Release Candidate 1 ISO image right now via our website and take it for a test drive. As usual, please try to keep in mind that this is still a pre-release version, which means that you should not install it on your production-ready machine. Don't forget to report bugs if you find any!