14 DAY TRIAL // OpenELEC, an embedded operating system built specifically to run XBMC, the open source entertainment media hub, has advanced to version 4.2 Beta 2 and is available for download and testing.
OpenELEC devs usually wait until a new version of XBMC Gotham is officially released, but this time they have jumped the gun a little and they've released an update for their distro. Interestingly enough, it's based on XBMC 13.2 Gotham Beta 2, but regular users will have to wait for the official announcement on that one.
The distribution is based on the latest XBMC version, which means that its developers are constantly implementing all the bleeding edge features and changes from that software.
“This release includes some bugfixes, security fixes and improvements since OpenELEC-4.1.1. Besides the usual bugfixes and package updates we updated XBMC to XBMC Gotham 13.2 beta 2, FFMpeg to ffmpeg-2.3, kernel to linux-3.15.6, Mesa to Mesa 10.2.4 and Xorg to the final version of xorg-server-1.16.0. We updated the RaspberryPi firmware to include the last fixes and features and fixed some issues with not starting XBMC/Xorg on some AMD hardware.”
“Since OpenELEC 4.0 we have some parts of the underlying OS reworked. OpenELEC 4.1/4.2 is now based on Kernel linux-3.15, Mesa-10.2 and Xorg-1.16. We updated the Nvidia Graphic drivers in the 64-bit image to 340.x (32-bit remains on 304.123), Systemd to systemd-215, our Connectionmanager to connman-1.24 and XBMC to XBMC Gotham 13.2,” reads the official announcement.
The developers have also decided to switch from eglibc to glibc and to provide support for nss-mdns, filesystem checks on every boot for the both default system partitions, and h265(HEVC).
OpenELEC is one of the most advanced distributions of its kind because its makers have chosen to implement the latest packages. For example, OpenELEC is one of the few distros that have the latest branch of the kernel, in this case 3.15.6. This is very important for them because they have to be sure that their OS is able to run on any modern new hardware, and that can only be achieved by implementing the latest software.
A number of other smaller changes have also been made. For example, the debug shell is now available in the installer, the RPi support patch has been improved, and the lcdd.service has been tuned.
Check out the official announcement for a complete list of changes and improvements. You can download OpenELEC 4.2 Beta 2 right now from Softpedia.
Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.