14 DAY TRIAL // The third Beta version of Scientific Linux 7.0, a recompiled Red Hat Enterprise Linux put together by various labs and universities around the world, has been released and is now available for testing.
The developers of Scientific Linux 7.0 are moving very fast and they managed to push yet another update for this operating system. New builds seem to be released every couple of weeks.
Scientific Linux is a very popular Linux distribution in the scientific community and it’s used all over the world, including places like Fermilab and CERN. It’s one of the most stable distros around and it’s been in production for a very long time.
"SL is a Linux release put together by Fermilab, CERN, and various other labs and universities around the world. Its primary purpose is to reduce duplicated effort of the labs, and to have a common install base for the various experimenters. The base SL distribution is basically Enterprise Linux, recompiled from source."
"Our secondary goal is to allow easy customization for a site, without disturbing the Scientific Linux base. The various labs are able to add their own modifications to their own site areas. By the magic of scripts, and the anaconda installer, each site is to be able to create their own distributions with minimal effort. Or, if a user wishes, they can simply install the base SL release," reads the official website.
According to the changelog, the artwork is now correctly sized for large KDE desktops, more steps have been taken toward the implementation of Secure Boot, shim-unsigned now features the fnal-sl.cer for building shim, kernel modules are now correctly signed by a FNAL cert, kernel now features a driver update and kpatch public key, and a number of other smaller changes have been implemented as well.
As usual, there are a few things that haven’t been implemented. For example, OpenAFS packages for SL7 haven’t arrived just yet, EPEL is still a Beta product, and Scientific Linux is not yet able to boot on UEFI systems, but that will change very soon.
A complete list of changes and updates can be found in the official announcement for the regular distribution. You can download Scientific Linux 7.0 Beta 3 right now from Softpedia.
Remember that this is a development release and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended to be used for testing purposes only.