The development team of the Zenwalk GNU/Linux Operating System are pleased to announce that the latest stable major release, Zenwalk 3.0, is now available for download as a CDROM ISO, and from CD stores.

The ISO image and packages tree can be found here : http://www.zenwalk.org/modules/tinycontent/index.php?id=1

This release includes both numerous software and visual advancements. Key software improvements include XFCE-4.3.99.1, the Linux kernel-2.6.17.11 Firefox-1.5.0.6, Thunderbird-1.5.0.5, Xarchiver-0.4 as well as many others all updated to the latest releases (around 200 packages updated or added).

Visual aspects of the desktop have been improved by using a complete Tango icon set as well as new custom wallpapers and themes leading to the most uniform graphical desktop ever. All applications from system tools to text editors and media players look as though they were made for each other as a unified operating system (including the Mozilla suite).

When it comes to installation of the system, the Zenwalk setup wizard is, as usual, a graphical ncurses based menu. The user does not have to type any Linux command to complete the few installation steps, and the installation wizard will detect any hardware device including video cards, networking devices, sound cards, usb peripherals and much more, leading to a completely functional system, ready to perform any task.

Many subsystems have been improved, for example the udev based automount system now have the ability to detect media insertions (CD/DVD...) via uwd, the Udev Watchdog Daemon : a Zenwalk specific development.
Software suspend to disk is now ready to use out of the box : making the computer hibernate is simply achieved by hitting a keyboard shortcut.

Zenwalk features a modern package management system with a graphical user interface called netpkg. Netpkg is extremly flexible, fast, includes dependency tracking and can be used to search packages from multiple repositories that you can choose from the graphical GTK2 menu or from CLI menus depending on the runlevel you are in. All system tools react like this : GTK2 when X is running, ncurses when not in X.

An important aspect of Zenwalk is the expanding community surrounding the distribution. The community supporting Zenwalk has expanded into the following websites:

1. TuxGames.net: TuxGames offers a wide variety of video games ranging from First Person Shooters to Children's and educational games. You will find all of your classic video game favorites as well as the most modern bleeding edge titles there. See http://www.tuxgames.net/ for more details.

2. ZenCommunity: This is a friendly and open user based software community where users can actively participate in building, testing and supporting software with the goal of creating the largest software repository on earth. See http://users.zenwalk.org/ for more details.

3. ZenLive: The Zenwalk Live CD project . ZenLive's releases closely follow new Zenwalk releases and showcase Zenwalk prior to hard drive installation. See http://www.zenlive.tuxfamily.org/ for more details.

4. Fred.org: If you are an artist, you have a blast creating and submitting digital artwork with our main art site: http://f-r-e-d.org/ and in the artwork section of our forums.