14 DAY TRIAL // Scientific Linux's Pat Riehecky reports on the availability of the first Release Candidate (RC) development build of the upcoming Scientific Linux 7.3 open-source operating system based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3.
Now that Red Hat launched the latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3 enterprise-ready operating system, it was just a matter of time for CentOS, Scientific Linux, and other forks to up their game and announce new, updated versions of their GNU/Linux distributions, based, of course, on the freely distributed sources of the former.
A first Release Candidate is already available for Scientific Linux 7.3, if you want to be an early adopter and a sport to report bugs, but if no critical ones are being reported during the testing period of two weeks, this RC build will be re-released as the final version of the operating system later this month, on January 25, 2017.
These are the major differences from Scientific Linux 7.2
It looks to us like the Scientific Linux developers no longer add any major changes to the OS, and Scientific Linux 7.3 won't be a big update as some of you might have hoped, as it only bumps the OpenAFS open-source implementation of the Andrew File System (AFS) to version 1.6.20, and adds a new Scientific Linux End User License Agreement.
But don't worry, the EULA was only changed to contain information about the U.S. Government contract under which Fermilab develops the Scientific Linux operating system. Other than that, there are a handful of improvements to the Anaconda installer, in particular to the anaconda-addon-org_scientificlinux_contexts package.
"The Scientific Linux context plugin has been altered to be less aggressive in its use of network resources. Several isolated crash reports and unexpected network bugs have been addressed. Now Context Data should only be fetched for users selecting context items," read the release notes for Scientific Linux 7.3 RC.
If you want to help test the new Release Candidate of Scientific Linux 7.3, go ahead and download the 64-bit ISO image from our website. However, please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, it's not suitable for production use, and you shouldn't install it on any of your desktops.