14 DAY TRIAL // On October 11, 2016, the LibreELEC development team announced the availability of a new Alpha pre-prelease version of the upcoming LibreELEC 8.0 "Krypton" operating system based on the latest Kodi Media Center software.
The new Alpha build, LibreELEC (Krypton) 7.90.007, is the seventh in the series, and it brings you the third Beta of the forthcoming Kodi 17 "Krypton" media center announced last week. Of course, this means that all the bug fixes and improvements implemented in Kodi 17 Beta 3 are also present in the LibreELEC 7.90.007 Alpha version, along with various other enhancements made by the team since the previous Alpha build.
"LibreELEC (Krypton) 8.0 preview builds continue with v7.90.007 containing Kodi v17.0-beta3 which is starting to focus less on big changes and more on bug fixing," reads the announcement. "Amlogic audio also makes a leap forwards thanks to @kwiboo and @longchair from the RasPlex and Plex Inc. teams completing Amlogic kernel changes that allow hardware auto-detection capabilities in Kodi to “just work” without hacks."
Another interesting change implemented in the seventh LibreELEC 8.0 Alpha milestone is a function injected into the settings add-on, which allows you to submit important log files to a paste online service if you want to help the developers fix issues in the operating system. Under the hood, LibreELEC 7.90.007 Alpha uses Linux kernel 4.7.6, iMX6 kernel 4.4.19, linux-amlogic 3.14 kernel, and Nvidia 340.98 proprietary driver.
LibreELEC 8.0 to support Intel Baytrail 32-bit EFI booting
There are many interesting features coming to the final LibreELEC 8.0 "Krypton" release, besides Kodi 17 media center, which is also dubbed "Krypton," and the new Alpha adds HK RTC shield support on Odroid C2 SBCs, support for the WeTek Play 2 (S905) device, DRI/Glamour support for AMD Radeon graphics cards, as well as initial support for Intel Baytrail 32-bit EFI booting.
While you can download and test drive the LibreELEC 7.90.007 Alpha release for your devices, the development cycle will continue with a new Alpha build and a few Beta versions, which promise to add support for the recently released Linux 4.8 kernel. The final release of the LibreELEC 8.0 "Krypton" operating system should be available in the coming months.