The first beta of Zenwalk 5.4 is ready for testing.

This beta version is a good preview of the upcoming Zenwalk 5.4, as we are mostly waiting for XFCE 4.6 final.

Zenwalk 5.4 will have the bigest changelog ever for Zenwalk (6 months since 5.2). Most if not all packages have been rebuilt for improvement or update, and many new features have been added, some regarding the base system.

Here's a list of the most important changes :

- Kernel 2.6.27.10 with gspca (supports many USB webcams)
- XFCE 4.6 (beta2, already very stable)
- Faster boot (tunned init scripts, with realtime I/O scheduler)
- PAM authentication has been added to the system
- Wicd is becoming the main network configuration tool
- Improved suspend/hibernate, with XFCE Power Manager
- new Netpkg with orphan dependencies and "offline operation" support
- New Zenpanel with integrated Disk Manager, Wifi and Wired Network Manager
- Gksu keyring based desktop granting system
- New artwork
- Many new applications

Please report any bug or missing feature so that we can prepare Zenwalk 5.4 release candidate

Cheers
JP


Downloads :
http://zenwalk.enialis.net/people/jp/20 ... 4BETA1.iso
ftp://ftp.linuxforum.hu/mirrors/zenwalk ... 4BETA1.iso

Kool. Great work fellas.

I have two questions.
1) If I follow these instructions, will I benefit from all of the changes?
2) Should we update our systems now? I don't care if something weird happens as long as I can fix it later.

And one last thing.
I updated my other computer yesterday and found that the NVIDIA "new" driver from the repository doesn't work. xorg wasn't able to start with it as the display driver.
The driver from NVIDIA's site works though.
(I don't know if that's the cause but the kernel version and the version mentioned in the driver package is not the same. 25 and 27).

well the instructions should work, as i already installed most of the packages directly from snapshot tree few days before and again back to current. But i wud suggest u to test as a iso package since if any bug found can be clearly reported instead of upgrading and things gets mixed up.

As Jp clearly says, its a beta. So stable system choiced peeps need not upgrade. Instead install it as a new one. When things gets stable at a later date, just upgrade if u want to.

Installing 5.4 into a virtual machine using VirtualBox will result in X crashing and getting a black screen. I believe this is a VirtualBox problem with the vesa driver that is installed. I manage to get around this by installing VBoxGuest additons which installs a vbox video driver. Here's how:
1) At the black screen after X crashes , do a Ctrl-F2 to get into a terminal sessions
If doing a Ctrl-F2 does not get you into a terminal session then try this:

2) log in as root
2) download VBoxGuestAddition iso. Since I'm using VB2.1.0 I did this by doing :


4) Make a directory to mount the iso on

3) change to the directory where the iso is located and mount the iso


Here's an alternate suggestion by dsmithhfx for getting VBoxGuestAdditionsmounted using a local copy of it
a) Select "Install Guest Addition.." in the Devices menu in the VirtualBox menu bar. This attaches the local copy of of the VBoxGuestAddions on /dev/sr0
b) mount the iso

4) change to newly mounted iso directory and and run GuestAddition script

5) After the script is finished, reboot the vm

I downloaded from
ftp.sh.cvut.cz/MIRRORS/zenwalk/people/jp/20081224/
but the md5sum don't fit.
Was it my fault, or why are different sizes displayed on the different sites?

probably a joke from RSYNC

Sounds like it hadn't finished syncing. You can still recover. If you used wget, just start wget again, but using the -c switch so it will continue. I've done that a couple of times when I've been too impatient to wait to be sure the file is all uploaded. So long as you specify the same url in the wget command, it will happily carry on until you get everything.

paul.

May I ask why PAM was included? One of the main features of Slackware and Slack-based distros (and I consider this one as such) is the absence of PAM.

What does this mean for Slackware compatibility? Do you plan to diverge more from Slackware, like Ubuntu diverges more and more from Debian?

Note: This is not meant as criticism, I'm just curious in which direction Zenwalk will develop.

I downloaded from two different mirrors and got the same md5sum, but different from correct md5sum. I decided to burn the image to CD anyway. K3B thought something was wrong, but I decided to gamble one blank CD. Several packages were missing and so the install didn't end well. From my experience, there is something wrong with the ISO image on the mirrors.

iso in all links in the 1st post are 462MB, which is too short, it should be 532MB! This should be good though:
http://zenwalk.enialis.net/people/jp/20 ... 4BETA1.iso

This RSYNC problem must be fixed today.



JP

Congratulations guys!
I know it's still way to go to final release 5.4 but I'm happy for the progress.

You know there's no news in www.zenwalk.org from 24 August 2008 up to 24 December 2008, while at least there's some news at least in the space of two months before August 2008.
No wonder some people thought this distro was going into hibernation.

I have an idea, how about some news of the progress every two month.
I know the ZW team maybe don't think it's a big deal, but for the sake of the distro it's not too much of an effort to post it in ZW official site's news.

That's what we're <cough> trying to do with the Newsletter...

...dunno if enough people are reading it...