On behalf of the IzPack team, I would like to wish you all th every best for 2009 
See you next year with even more advances in IzPack!
The IzPack project is glad to announce the immediate availability of the version 4.2.0.
IzPack is a one-stop solution for packaging, distributing and deploying applications.
It is fully cross-platform and generates a single installer. As such, it is an alternative to native solutions such as platform-specific installers and package managers.
IzPack-generated installers only require a Java virtual machine to run.
IzPack can be downloaded from the website at http://izpack.org/
This latest release brings some new features, including:
- the support of REG_EXPAND_SZ data types when interacting with the Windows registry
- the ability to plug data validators on each panel
- the ability to provide user-oriented help written in HTML for panels
- Ant-style fileset support for refpack definitions
- a new utility for generating JNLP descriptors
- the optional ability for an installer to perform a privileges elevation (i.e., run as an administrator instead of a regular user), works on Windows XP/Vista, Linux (xterm+sudo) and Mac OS X
In addition to that, many bugs, small improvements and documentation updates have been made.
We suggest that IzPack users upgrade to this new release for the next iteration of their product installers.
Finally, many thanks to the developers and contributors for reporting issues and making improvements!
The complete release notes follow.
Sub-task
[IZPACK-194] - Remove ConditionalUserInputPanel
Bug
[IZPACK-101] - Rules not corrected evaluated when performing an automated install [IZPACK-103] - ConditionalUserInputPanel missing AutomationHelper [IZPACK-188] - Localisation key for caption not looked up in UserInputPanel.java [IZPACK-191] - Installer Requirements Broken [IZPACK-199] - Conditions not evaluated in InstallPanel while doing automated installation [IZPACK-201] - Shortcut creation on non-english Linux (Ubuntu 8.10) [IZPACK-204] - Interface com.izforge.izpack.panels.Validator is missing in official Jar [IZPACK-208] - image in the HTMLInfoPanel does not show [IZPACK-213] - AutomatedInstaller complains about "invalid pack index" [IZPACK-216] - Izpack installer for SVN fails to start because of wrong ant file [IZPACK-221] - HTMLInfoPanel does not display html text that contains a meta content tag in its head area
Improvement
[IZPACK-140] - Registry access functionality shall allow creating registry items of type REG_EXPAND_SZ [IZPACK-164] - Validating Data on every panel [IZPACK-170] - Italian langpack update [IZPACK-187] - Improve visual look of installer UI [IZPACK-214] - resource/parsable types are missing in docs [IZPACK-215] - Since mac and linux does not want ctrl-m (carriage return) in shell script, make sure they are gone if marked as shell type [IZPACK-220] - Document hidden feature of HTMLInfoPanel
New Feature
[IZPACK-80] - Ignore errors on execution of external executable programs [IZPACK-163] - Possibility of registering Helps [IZPACK-177] - Fileset for Refpacks [IZPACK-184] - JNLP (java Web Start) generator [IZPACK-190] - Run an installer with privileged permissions [IZPACK-200] - Multiple packsLang.xml files
Task
[IZPACK-207] - Reformat Finnish LangPack
Test
[IZPACK-150] - Add integration tests
I came across a nice article on IzPack this morning:
Automation for the people: Wielding wizard-based installers
Thanks a lot to its author Paul Duvall for writing it!