14 DAY TRIAL // The development cycle of the Slackware-based Zenwalk 8.0 Linux kernel-based operating system continues, and its maintainers have announced the release of the third Beta build.
Zenwalk 8.0 entered development in mid-January 2016 with the first Beta release, and early adopters were able to get their hands on the second Beta build during the first week of February. Now, approximately eight weeks later, we can test the third Beta of the upcoming operating system.
According to the release notes, Zenwalk 8.0 Beta 3 adds various software updates, among which we can mention the latest LibreOffice 5.1.1 office suite, Chromium 49.0 web browser, MPlayer 1.3 video player, FFMpeg 3.0 multimedia backend, and multiple under-the-hood changes (see below for details).
"Many, many updates between Beta 2 and Beta 3 including FFmpeg 3, MPlayer 1.3, latest Chromium 49, latest LibreOffice 5.1.1, and a few changes at desktop level," reads the announcement. "And, last but not least, for your security a 'diod' firewall service has been added."
PulseAudio volume mixer is now installed by default
Among the under-the-hood improvements implemented in the third Beta release of Zenwalk 8.0, we can mention that the PulseAudio volume mixer is now installed by default, several system utilities received improvements, and the default desktop environment has been tweeked to offer intelligent hiding of the back panel.
Furthermore, the polkit application-level toolkit is now integrated into the desktop environment, providing users with a great Elevated Privileges Management (EPM) tool, and all the audio production software have been updated to their latest version at the moment of writing this article.
You can download Zenwalk 8.0 Beta 3 right now from our website, but don't forget that it's still a pre-release version, not suitable for deployment in production environments. Installable-only ISO images are provided just for the 64-bit (x86_64) hardware architecture.