Hi Zentyal users!
Your favorite development team proudly presents Zentyal 2.2. Zentyal is a Linux small business server that can act as a Gateway, Unified Threat Manager, Office Server, Infrastructure Manager, Unified Communications Server or a combination of them. The development of Zentyal started in 2004 and currently it is an enterprise-level Linux server solution that integrates over 35 open source network management tools in one single technology.
Let us summarize some of the new features of this new version.
Highlights
- Improved performance: thanks to the configuration backend rewrite using Redis 2.0 and other optimizations, the responsiveness of the interface and the speed of other processes have greatly improved.
- Better installation process: in addition to the general performance improvements that also affect the installation speed, the package selection interface has been simplified, allowing to easily select profiles or individual packages on a single page. There is also a new wizard that allows you to get and use a free Basic Subscription with just one click.
- Usability improvements: we have reorganized menus and interfaces, and polished a lot of small details that make the Zentyal user experience much more satisfactory. Moreover, we have also added new features like the ability of adding objects or services in a popup dialog directly from the drop-down lists when adding a rule using them.
- New i18n system: the translation system has also improved a lot, the strings that were impossible to translate before are now fully translatable, and the translations are provided as separate language packages which can be independently installed and updated much more often, providing a much better international experience with Zentyal.
- Captive Portal: brand new module to allow Internet access only for authenticated users and also limit bandwidth consumption according to their quota.
- Administrator audit logging: keep track of all the configuration changes done by the different users with administration rights in Zentyal. This feature also notifies of the actions that are going to be applied before saving changes.
- IPsec and PPTP support: new ways to establish VPN connections, specially useful with specific hardware or Windows environments.
- Virtual Machine management: integration with KVM and VirtualBox to provide easy administration of virtual machines integrated with the Zentyal interface.
- Improvements on DNS module: including the new transparent cache mode, forwarders support or the ability to configure SRV or TXT records.
- Zarafa 7 integration: new version of the groupware suite, with lots of improvements.
- Bandwidth usage data: the new bandwidth monitor module, not only integrates with the Captive Portal to limit the access, but also gathers information about the bandwidth consumption.
- Ad-blocking: this new HTTP Proxy feature allows to transparently remove advertisements from all the browsed pages.
- USB support: now you can install Zentyal from a USB stick, specially useful if your server does not have a CD-ROM drive.
Upgrading
It is possible to easily upgrade from an existing Zentyal 2.0 installation to Zentyal 2.2. All the information on how to upgrade as well as the known issues you have to take into account are described in the Migrating from Zentyal 2.0 to 2.2 page.
For those who are already using Zentyal 2.1, you just need to edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file, replace the 2.1 repository by the 2.2 one and upgrade all the packages with:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
Repository
Here is the APT source entry for Zentyal 2.2:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/zentyal/2.2/ubuntu lucid main
And also this one if you are interested in using Zarafa:
deb http://archive.zentyal.com/zentyal 2.2 extra
Full Change Log
You can read the full change log from 2.0 to 2.2 here.
About Zentyal
Zentyal, developer of a Linux server of the same name, aims at providing small and medium businesses a professional, reliable and secure server solution, that is yet easy to use and affordable. To reach this goal, the company develops Zentyal server and provides support, services and solutions based on Zentyal server either through Authorized Partners or directly to end customers.
The Zentyal Linux server development began in early 2004 and today it is the open source alternative to Windows Small Business Server. Currently Zentyal server gets about 1,000 daily downloads and the project has an active community of more than 5,000 members. Likewise, it is estimated that there are over 50,000 active Zentyal installations all over the globe.