Dear Zenwalk community,

I am happy to finally announce the release of Zenlive 7.2 - just a few days after Zenwalk 7.2 standard edition has been official launched !

A lot of fine tuning and testing was necessary and a lot of packages have been upgraded since the last beta3 to reflect recent changes in Zenwalk upstream.
And I really worked hard to address all the issues testers reported.
I hope you'll be satisfied with this final version.

While still beeing very close to the look'n'feel of Zenwalk standard edition, Zenlive is unique in it's own way.

This version is powered by kernel 3.2.5 with support for aufs 3.2, bootsplash and bfs scheduler and is featuring the slackware-live-scripts 0.3.6 framework
(http://slackware-live.tuxfamily.org).

I decided to stick with Wicd as the graphical network config tool although Zenwalk standard edition is using Network Manager as a replacement.
The main reason for that was that Network Manager requires to enter the root password if configuring new WiFi connections while Wicd handles that part a bit "smarter" and therefore fits better in the context of this live system.

Now that ZenLive will not fit on on a single 700 MB CD-R anymore (even without any extra content), it will be released as a DVD ISO image only.
But since DVD is a common media and due to the benefit of extra space that lets us include some additional goodies, I think most of the users can agree with that decision.
It is still <1 GB so that it even can fit onto small USB pen drives.



Well, let's take a close look on what do we have under the hood:


- New xz compression squashfs 4.0 (now in vanilla kernel)

- All new simple Installer and Live-scripts

- On-the-fly optional live module activation during the running live session, thanks to aufs3 and my loader script

- Persistent changes feature is now supported, even over network shares!

- Besides standard Zenwalk package set, ZenLive provides some additional packages for more functionality

- Additional language packs & full Japanese language input support
(should work for Korean and Chinese languages too)

- Fluxbox window manager and related apps now included in ZenLive ISO to provide an alternative to Xfce4

- nouveau driver included in kernel 3.2.5 is now enabled by default,
providing a _good_ 3D acceleration performance and support for a wide range of NVidia Cards (no need to ship the proprietary driver anymore )

- Broadcom wifi STA proprietary driver (wl.ko) is shipped with this release as optional live module

- New bootsplash theme (yes, still good old bootsplash; plymouth caused problems during my tests)

- finally updated ZenLive manual addressing the changes introduced by switching to Slackware-live-scripts (don't expect a detailed guide, but the essentials are covered )


My honest thanks goes to the Zenwalk main Dev-Team, JP, Pat and the
Slackware crew and of course Frank Endres the developer of the
sophisticated Slackware-Live-scripts and all the open source community.
Without the hard work and effort of you all, ZenLive wouldn't have been
possible!


And now grab your copy of ZenLive 7.2 from one of the mirrors and celebrate this brand new release:


http://zenwalk.pinguix.com/user-accounts/zenwalkuser/zenlive/zenlive-7.2-dvd.iso
http://zenwalk.pinguix.com/user-accounts/zenwalkuser/zenlive/zenlive-7.2-dvd.md5



Have fun and happy Zenwalking!


Sebastian Reisse