Zevenos 3.0
The ZevenOS Team is proud to announce the release of ZevenOS 3.0.
This version is based on Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat (10.10) and has a bunch of new features and changes.
The base system was updated to Kernel 2.6.35 which brings a bunch of new drivers. The biggest change here is the switch from the Nvidia OpenSource driver nv to nouveau. Besides that there are a lot of updated and refreshed wireless drivers on board.
Besides that ZevenOS 3.0 also has a lot of new stuff in the Desktop area.
Thunar has gained a new contextsensitive entry to convert images.
The deskbar was updated to have a freedesktop.org compliant dynamic menu which is editable with standard tools just like alacarte. Besides that the deskbar gained a lot of contextual menus which allow you to have access to commonly used actions, like change time & date or mute the volume. The quicklaunch items now also have a context menu which allows you to quickly access files & folder bookmarks, webbrowser bookmarks mediaplayer actions and e-mail creation. The deskbar also gained a speed and ressource improvement.
The Video encoding application Encode was updated to intelligently choose the right audio and video codec for the selected container format. Added was also the option for multithreading which will allow for great speed improvements on multicore CPUs.
2 Pass has been added aswell as the new WebM and MKV container format. With it comes also the support for VP8 Video encoding.
To configure your system ZevenOS 3.0 now uses its MAGI tool to have a centralized global configuration tool . So MAGI 2 now is only an application launcher .
Besides those improvements ZevenOS 3.0 also brings new default installed software for various tasks. The biggest changes are in the multimedia sector. Parole is now the default videoplayer and way faster than totem. Videoediting is now done with OpenShot which has a lot more features than avidemux. OpenShot allows you to create very easily good and professional looking videos.
To manage music they included Deadbeef as an very fast and less ressource intensive application than Rhythmbox. It allows you to manage music, play it back and even has a build in equalizer with foobar2k support aswell as a plugin interface.
When it comes to images and storing them they switched from the not so userfriendly Gthumb to Shotwell which offers a great user interface and easy image editing features .The Zeebar which was included from ZevenOS since version 1.0 was replaced by docky. Docky requires Compositing features which means they also developed an easy compositing manager which allows you to turn compositing on. Docky offers Drag’n Drop support aswell as theming support. ZevenOS 3.0 now also ships with a graphical proxy configuration tool.
Firefox still is the default browser for surfing the net and Claws-Mail is still the default mail client. Abiword and Gnumeric take care of the office business you might have.If you don’t like the software choices you have the option to install your favorite tool or search for a new tool in the new Software-Center.
Download link to the distribution ISO