14 DAY TRIAL // OpenELEC, an embedded operating system built specifically to run XBMC, the open source entertainment media hub, is now at version 4.2 Beta 3, following closely the release of the XBMC base.
The OpenELEC devs have quickly released a new build of their distribution and it's now based on the recently launched XBMC Gotham 13.2 Beta 3. This is more than a software and there are a number of other packages and features that need to be upgraded as well.
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-4.1.2. Besides the usual bugfixes and package updates we updated XBMC to XBMC Gotham 13.2 beta 3, FFMpeg to ffmpeg-2.3.1, kernel to linux-3.16 and Mesa to Mesa 10.2.5 . We updated the RaspberryPi firmware to include the last fixes and features.”
“Since OpenELEC 4.0 we have some parts of the underlying OS reworked. OpenELEC 4.1/4.2 is now based on Kernel linux 3.16, 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. We switched our libc from eglibc to glibc,” reads the official announcement.
The developers have also explained that support has been added for nss-mdns, users are now able to perform filesystem checks on every boot for both default system partitions, and the ffmpeg 2.3 packages are now also available in the 32-bit version of the distro.
One of the most interesting upgrades made in this release doesn't have anything to do with the XBMC base. The Linux kernel has been updated to version 3.16, which was released just a few days ago. In fact, this is the first Linux distribution that implements this bleeding edge kernel and the devs have been even faster than Arch Linux.
The development cycle for this release is still rather young and it will take a while to get all the changes and new features in place.
Check out the official announcement for a complete list of changes and improvements. You can download OpenELEC 4.2 Beta 3 right now from Softpedia, but keep in mind that this is not a regular image file.
Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.