14 DAY TRIAL // On May 1, 2016, the OpenELEC devs had the pleasure of announcing the release of the third Beta build of the forthcoming OpenELEC 7.0 Linux kernel-based operating system for embedded devices.
Built around the recently released Kodi 16.1 "Jarvis" open-source and cross-platform media center, OpenELEC 7.0 Beta 3 arrives on the first day of May with Bluetooth Audio support, OpenVPN support, updated WLAN drivers and firmware, an up-to-date Intel graphics driver, support legacy and new Nvidia graphics cards, and much more.
"Users running OpenELEC 6.95.1 or later with auto-update enabled will be prompted on-screen to reboot and apply the update once it has been downloaded and enabled in some hours. Users running older OpenELEC releases or with auto-update disabled will need to manually update," reads the announcement.
What's new in OpenELEC 7.0 Beta 3
Since Beta 2, the OpenELEC developers managed to update various core components. Among these, we can mention OpenELEC-settings 0.6.13, util-linux 2.28, BlueZ 5.39, bcm2835-firmware 611d798, libsndfile 1.0.26, libdrm 2.4.68, FUSE 2.9.6, libinput 1.2.4, ccache 3.2.5, sqlite-autoconf 3120200, misc-firmware 0582042, and cpu-firmware 0920a7f.
The OpenELEC distribution is currently powered by a kernel from the long-term supported Linux 4.4 series, version 4.4.8, and sports an updated graphics stacks consisting of Mesa 11.2.1 3D Graphics Library, xf86-video-amdgpu 1.1.0, xf86-video-ati 7.7.0, xf86-input-libinput 0.18.0, as well as updated AMDGPU and Radeon firmware.
If you want to help the OpenELEC developers discover and patch the last remaining issues before the final OpenELEC 7.0 release hits the stable channels, which should happen in the next few weeks, you can download the OpenELEC 7.0 Beta 3 binary images right now via our website and start testing it.