The latest version of this Scientific Linux distro can be downloaded from Softpedia

Jul 27, 2014 16:57 GMT  ·  By

The first Beta version of Scientific Linux 7.0, a recompiled Red Hat Enterprise Linux put together by various labs and universities around the world, has been released and is now available for testing.

The developers of Scientific Linux 7.0 don’t seem to waste any minute, and just a few days after the release of the second Alpha in the series, a new Beta version is already available. Quite a few changes have been implemented since the previous version, but it’s still a Beta and it’s not ready for widespread production.

Scientific Linux is a very popular Linux distribution in the scientific community and it’s used all over the world, including places like Fermilab and CERN. It’s one of the most stable distros around and it’s been in production for a very long time.

“Fermilab's intention is to continue the development and support of Scientific Linux and refine its focus as an operating system for scientific computing. Today we are announcing an alpha release of Scientific Linux 7. We continue to develop a stable process for generating and distributing Scientific Linux, with the intent that Scientific Linux remains the same high quality operating system the community has come to expect.”

“The ‘everything’ dvd image requires a Dual-Layer (DL) compatible drive for both burning and booting off of. The livecd-iso-to-disk utility is able to convert this to USB successfully,” reads the official announcement.

According to the changelog, coreutils is now required for the %post script, yum-cron is now installed by default and acts just like the previous yum-autoupdate, yum-cron no longer applies updates automatically and now requires input from the user, the SL Extras repo tracking TUV's Extras are now provided, the de-branded Upstream hardware test toolkit is now available in the repos, and the distro should now fit just fine on a regular DVD.

As usual, there are a few things that haven’t been implemented. For example, OpenAFS packages for SL7 haven’t arrived just yet, EPEL is still a Beta product, and Scientific Linux is not yet able to boot on UEFI systems, but that will change very soon.

A complete list of changes and updates can be found in the official announcement for the regular distribution. You can download Scientific Linux 7.0 Alpha 2 right now from Softpedia.

Remember that this is a development release and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended to be used for testing purposes only.