Numerous important packages have been updated

Sep 28, 2014 15:45 GMT  ·  By

The embedded operating system built specifically to run the famous XBMC media player solution, OpenELEC, has been upgraded to version 4.2.0 and the image is now ready for download.

The OpenELEC devs have finally released the stable version of the operating system after numerous Beta iterations. A huge number of fixes and updates have been implemented in all the intermediary Betas, and that makes this release an important one.

OpenELEC usually follows the XBMC project very closely, but this is an operating system and it's more than just integrating a media hub. It's made of many "moving" parts that need upgrades and improvements, and that is just one if the reasons why the 4.2.0 release arrived so late after XBMC 13.2 was made available.

This is a good time to update

"There has been many months of development and testing in the run-up to this releases, but like any major update there are a lot of changes. Unfortunately, we are unable to test every scenario on all hardware, so it’s possible you might pick up on an issue we may have missed (this is why we do beta tests). We would like anyone brave enough to test this release and report issues that they find either with OpenELEC or XBMC."

"The number of builds supported has been simplified. As of OpenELEC 4.x, images will be provided for AppleTV, Generic (i386 and x86_64) and Raspberry Pi’s. We have also recently added support for Solid-Run Cubox-I devices to OpenELEC. However, this support is still under active development. Given the fact that this code base is not yet stable, we will not be providing an image for Cubox-i devices with OpenELEC-4.x," reads the official announcement.

The developers have upgraded the Linux kernel to version 3.16.x, which is right now the most advanced kernel branch available. This component needs to be as new as possible because the system is built to run on an array of platforms and the newer the kernel, the more supported platforms there are.

Also, the NVIDIA drivers have been updated to the 340.x branch for the 64-bit version and the 32-bit release still uses the old 304.123 version. A new MMC/SDCard driver for RaspberryPi has been implemented and it should provide much better performance for this platform, and a number of new packages that include support for nss-mdns have been added.

More details about the changes and improvements can be found in the official announcement. You can download OpenELEC 4.2.0 right now from Softpedia, but you also have to keep in mind that this is not a regular image.