The distribution is now available only for 64-bit PCs

Jul 2, 2016 11:53 GMT  ·  By

Jean-Philippe Guillemin, the developer of Zenwalk, has proudly announced today, July 2, 2016, the final release of the Slackware-based Zenwalk 8.0 GNU/Linux operating system.

Based on the just-released Slackware 14.2 operating system, Zenwalk 8.0 is finally here, powered by Linux kernel 4.4.14 LTS, the same one that can be found in the monumental Slackware Linux, thus offering users support for the latest hardware devices. Zenwalk's default desktop environment is Xfce 4.12.1, and it now ships with a new layout that's more user-friendly than ever.

But Zenwalk 8.0 is loaded with some of the best and most up-to-date open-source software applications. For example, you'll be able to write any office document with LibreOffice 5.1.3, surf the Web with Chromium 51.0, as well as enjoy your movies with the powerful MPlayer 1.3 and the FFMpeg 3.0.1 multimedia backend.

"Zenwalk 8.0 is a 'less than 1GB ISO' pure Slackware system with added post-install configurations, optimizations and tunings already done out of the box, with a ready to use polished desktop environment, with added graphical system tools, added office and multimedia applications, and striped to keep just 'one application per task,'" said Jean-Philippe Guillemin.

A 64-bit only GNU/Linux distribution

Starting with Zenwalk 8.0, the GNU/Linux distribution is now available only for 64-bit computers, as the developer thinks 32-bit PCs are hard to find these days, and maintaining both ports takes a lot of time. "I believe that the old 32 bits architecture is for small specialized systems only, not for desktop," explains the developer while encouraging the community to collaborate and port the OS to the 32-bit platform.

Under the hood, Zenwalk 8.0 comes with tweaked I/O and CPU scheduling policies to allow desktop applications to perform much better. Then, there's also the integration of the Policykit privileges elevation features that allows users to configure various things that would normally require administrative privileges (root access), such as changing the system clock, set the system locale and login manager.

Last but not least, Netpkg, Zenwalk's default package manager, and the system installer have both received various improvements in Zenwalk 8.0 to make installing the OS and your entire desktop experience more comfortable. The Zenwalk 8.0 ISO images are available for download right now via our website, but again, please note that you can only install the GNU/Linux distribution on a 64-bit capable computer.

Zenwalk 8.0 with Xfce 4.12.1
Zenwalk 8.0 with Xfce 4.12.1

Zenwalk 8.0 (2 Images)

Zenwalk 8.0 released
Zenwalk 8.0 with Xfce 4.12.1
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