The projects gets a little closer to a stable version

Jun 16, 2015 09:41 GMT  ·  By

OpenELEC, the embedded operating system built specifically to run the KODI (XBMC) media player hub, has just received an update for the new 6.0 branch, and it brings it a little bit closer to the stable version.

It's been quite a while since the first Beta for OpenELEC 6.0 landed for everyone to test and enjoy, and now the developers have pushed a second one out the door and it brings a lot more changes, improvements, and package updates. Since OpenELEC is based on Kodi (formerly known as XBMC) and a new Kodi Beta has just been made available, it's not really a surprise that OpenELEC 6.0 Beta 2 is ready for testing.

People tend to forget that OpenELEC is an operating system, so its developers need to change more than just the base. They also have to take into consideration all other major components, like the Linux kernel or the drivers. OpenELEC is also described as an OS for embedded devices, and that means that it needs to be able to work on the latest hardware. Its makers keep the packages almost on the bleeding edge to make sure that it can run on basically anything with a processor.

OpenELEC 6.0 has switched to Linux kernel 4.0 and Systemd

"The most visible change is the update from Kodi-14.2 Helix to Kodi-15.0 Isengard (beta 2). Beginning with Kodi-15 most audio encoder, audio decoder, PVR and visualisation addons are no longer included in our base OS, but they are available via Kodi's addon manager and must be installed from there, if needed. Our own PVR backends such as VDR and TVHeadend will install needed dependencies automatically," wrote the developers.

It's also worth noting that the following packages have been updated as well and added by default: Mesa 10.6, Xorg 1.17, FFMpeg 2.6, Binutils 2.25, Glibc 2.21, LLVM 3.6, Linux kernel 4.0, and NVidia's latest stable GPU drivers.

The OpenELEC developers have also dropped the Generic 32bit (i386) builds. It seems that there aren't many devices out there with this kind of processor, with the exception of NVidia ION, but they can also run the 64-bit edition.

You can download OpenELEC 6.0 Beta 2 right now from Softpedia, but you also have to keep in mind that this is not a regular image. Still, you can run it from a USB key by using the regular tools.

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OpenELEC 5.0 main menu
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