ZevenOS 5.0 delivers an early Christmas present

ZevenOS looks like the BeOS of old

The ZevenOS developers have decided to bring their users an "early Christmas present" with the release of version 5.0 of their Linux distribution. ZevenOS 5.0 introduces what the developers term "a touch of BeOS" to its Xfce desktop. This mostly consists of theming Xfce with a distinct BeOS-like look. In line with this, the distribution focuses very much on multimedia applications and ships with most of the popular codecs.

ZevenOS 5.0 is based on Xubuntu 12.10 and ships with version 3.5 of the Linux kernel, X.org 7.7, and Audacity 2.0 and OpenShot 1.4.3 are pre-installed. Media players include MPlayer 1.06 and Deadbeef 0.5.6, and ZevenOS also includes its own YAVTD video encoder, which has the ability to download videos from several online sources. The GIMP and Inkscape graphics applications are also pre-installed. The default installation doesn't include a full-featured office suite, but Abiword and Gnumeric are installed. Users can install additional packages from the regular Ubuntu repositories.

The ISO image for ZevenOS 5.0 is available from mirrors listed on the project's download page and fits on a conventional CD. Users who are looking for more than a visual likeness to BeOS can try Haiku, which provides an open source implementation with BeOS compatibility.

(fab)