14 DAY TRIAL // OpenELEC 4.2 Beta 4, an embedded operating system built specifically to run XBMC, the open source entertainment media hub, has been released and is now ready for testing.
The OpenELEC devs didn't jump at the opportunity to release a new version right after the launch of XBMC Gotham 13.2 RC1, like they did on previous occasions. It took them a few days to get the new version out, but they had good reason to.
“This release includes some bugfixes, security fixes and improvements since OpenELEC-4.1.3. Besides the usual bugfixes and package updates we updated XBMC to XBMC Gotham 13.2 RC1, FFMpeg to ffmpeg-2.3.2, kernel to linux-3.16.1 and OpenSSL to OpenSSL-1.0.1i. We fixed crashes with LiveTV introduced in 4.1.3, added fixes for iMON and Xpad Controllers and remotes, added support for DVBSky s950v3 and s952v3 DVB hardware and 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,” reads the official announcement.
The developers have also explained that this current build also includes a new MMC/SDCard driver, but it has been disabled by default. This will probably become the default implementation of the driver in future releases. It's also worth noting that the distribution has moved from eglibc to glibc, nss-mdns support has been added, filesystem checks are now performed on every boot for both of the default system partitions, and FFmpeg 2.3 has been added to the x86 builds.
Also, the FM support patch has been updated, OpenSS has been updated to version1.0.1i, cmake is now at version 3.0.1, the Linux kernel has been updated to version 3.16.1, the optional MMC_BCM2835 and MMC_BCM2835_DMA drivers have been enabled, diagonals for iMON PAD in keyboard mode are now ignored, support for dvbsky s950v3 / s952v3 has been added, and a patch from the work Valve did on the xpad kernel driver has been implemented.
Check out the official announcement for a complete list of changes and improvements. You can download OpenELEC 4.2 Beta 4 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.