Connie Sieh and Troy Dawson announced last evening (November 4th) the immediate availability of Scientific Linux 5.4, a Linux distribution put together by various universities and labs around the world. Being based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Update 4, the new release of Scientific Linux brings improved support for Atheros wireless chipsets, the iwlwifi 5150 ucode firmware, lots of updated packages and numerous bug fixes. The iwlwifi 4945, 3945, and 5000 ucode has also been updated, and the Lua programming language has been added.

"We want to thank everyone who has contributed, tested, and given us feedback. We say that every time, but we really mean it. Without everyone's help and testing, this release wouldn't be as good as it is. Scientific Linux release 5.4 is based on the rebuilding of RPMS out of SRPMS's from Enterprise 5 Server and Client, including Update 4. It also has all errata and bugfixes up until November 1, 2009." - the Scientific Linux team said in the official release announcement.

Let's have a closer look now at the main packages that were updated in Scientific Linux 5.4:

· 915resolution 0.5.3-6;
· Alpine 2.00-2;
· AUFS 0.20090202.cvs-6;
· CFITSIO 3.100-1;
· DKMS 2.1.0.1-1;
· dropit 1.2-1;
· FFTW 3.1.2-5;
· fuse-smb 0.8.7-1;
· fuse-sshfs 2.0-1;
· Graphviz 2.24.0;
· IceWM 1.2.37;
· Imlib 1.9.15-11;
· Intel wireless firmware 1.3-5;
· JAVA 1.6.0.16 Update 15;
· KDEedu 3.5.4;
· Lame 3.97-1;
· Lua 5.1.2-1;
· gstreamer-plugins-extras 0.10.9-2;
· k3b-extras 0.12.17;
· NDISwrapper 1.55-1;
· NumPy 1.2.1-1;
· OpenAFS 1.4.11-76;
· R 2.8.1-1;
· Ralink wireless firmware PCI 1.2-1;
· Ralink wireless firmware USB 1.8-1;
· Scipy 0.6.0-6;
· Tidy 0.99.0-12.20070228;
· suitesparse 3.1.0-1;
· XFS 0.4-2;
· Yumex 2.0.3-1.0;
· gv 3.6.2-2.

For a complete list of updated packages and bug fixes, take a look at the official release notes.

About Scientific Linux

Scientific Linux is a distribution put together by miscellaneous universities and labs around the world. It was created to reduce the duplicated effort of the labs and as an install base for the numerous experimenters. Scientific Linux is actually an Enterprise Linux, built from sources of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 series.

Download Scientific Linux 5.4 right now from Softpedia.