14 DAY TRIAL // The second Alpha version of Scientific Linux 7.0, a recompiled Red Hat Enterprise Linux put together by various labs and universities around the world, is now available for download and testing.
The developers of Scientific Linux 7.0 have moved very fast and, just a week after the first Release Candidate, a new development release has been made available. Given the short development period since the first Alpha, it's actually surprising that the devs managed to get all those changes and improvements in.
“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, the TUV branding has been removed from abrt, dhcp, libreport, PackageKit, and subscription-manager, firstboot has been updated, the Anaconda installer has been updated, the support for XFS is now working correctly in all standard cases, the subscription-manager-migration has been removed, yum-conf-elrepo has been added, SL_no_colorls has been added per community request, SL_enable_serialconsole has been implemented per community request, and yum-conf-sl7x has been implemented (currently it does nothing, but it will eventually point yum to the SL 7x repo).
Also, yum-cron has been added to the default installation, the default configuration does not exclude any packages, users can now modify /etc/yum-cron.conf to set any exclusion, and more.
The developers have also explained that some features don't work just yet. For example, OpenAFS packages for SL7 will be built in future releases, yum-conf-epel will be added (still in Beta), and Scientific Linux has joined the UEFI forum with the intent of providing valid secure boot images. As it stands right now, Scientific Linux can't be installed on UEFI systems, but the final version should work.
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.