A new development release of the OpenELEC Linux distro is now available for download

Aug 31, 2014 13:40 GMT  ·  By

OpenELEC 4.2 Beta 5, 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 have released yet another Beta version of their embedded operating systems and they are getting really close to get a new stable version out the door. Some of the major components have been updated as well and the Raspberry Pi users should be really thrilled about this latest upgrade, as it includes some interesting changes for them as well.

"This release includes some bugfixes, security fixes and improvements since OpenELEC-4.1.4. Besides the usual bugfixes and package updates we updated XBMC to XBMC Gotham 13.2 final, FFMpeg to ffmpeg-2.3.3, Mesa to Mesa-10.3-rc1and systemd to systemd-216. We fixed crashes while playing FLAC files with ID3v2 tags, optimized some software packages and updated the RaspberryPi firmware to include the last fixes and features," said the devs in the official announcement.

The Raspberry Pi users will find that a new MMC/SDCard driver has been added and is now now enabled by default.

"This is now the default sdcard driver. It should avoid some of the issues of the old driver, like polling with interrupts disabled, and could improve performance and avoid interfering with other drivers (e.g. USB or LIRC). You can disable the new driver with adding bcm2708.bcm2835_mmc=0 to cmdline.txt. Please report any issues with this driver in our forums," is also noted in the announcement.

According to the changelog, the Linux kernel has been updated to version 3.16, Mesa has been update to version 10.3.0 RC1, Xorg is now at version 1.16, the NVIDIA drivers have been upgrade to a new branch, 340.x, for the 64-bit edition, systemd has been updated to version 216, FFmpeg 2.3.3 has been implemented, taglib has been downgrade to version 1.8, and many more packages have been updated as well.

The developers have also explained that the system has switched libc from eglibc to glibc, support has been added for nss-mdns, and support has been implemented to perform filesystem checks on every boot for our both default system partitions.

Check out the official announcement for a complete list of changes and improvements. You can download OpenELEC 4.2 Beta 5 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.