Dear Community, Zenwalk 4.4 has been released.

This new version of Zenwalk utilizes the new Xfce 4.4 desktop and kernel 2.6.20. It introduces many new features and utilities : everything has been polished in many ways.

The automount system has been enhanced to detect and handle more CD/DVD devices, including dynamic mountpoints management. Fusesmbtool has been updated and can now be launched from the Thunar file manager on any folder in order to browse network shares.

Zenwalk 4.4 introduces the hotname system : with a few mouse clicks you can rename any usb mounted device to your preferred "nice" name. For example you can call your camera "canon1", then it will be mounted as "canon1" each time you plug it in Zenwalk. Hotname is written in LUA, so the LUA interpreter has been added to the development tools.

Further more this version takes advantage of a new printing system, gutenprint, which replaces the unsupported gimp-print, and Zenwalk now uses CUPS 1.2 series printer service (1.2.7).

The structure of the Zenwalk project has been changed, which includes a unification of various package repositories and a collaboration with Linuxpackages.net and the fact that the package manager 'netpkg' has been updated. The documentation of the project has been moved to MediaWiki and has been unified / structured better. We hope that these changes will make it easier for our users to navigate in the Zenwalk space.

Note that the 2.6.20 kernel is used with exclusive libata subsystem that changes the mount setup : all SATA and PATA devices are now called "sdX" instead of "hdX" even for PATA (optical devices are called "srX"). Several Zenwalk system scripts and tools have been modified to comply with this kernel.

In the extra repository, among many other packages, the KDE set of packages have been updated to version 3.5.6 and OpenOffice to 2.1.0 and many new packages have been added.

Enjoy the ride!

Best regards,
The Zenwalk Team