This is the final version in this branch of the OS

Nov 13, 2014 13:44 GMT  ·  By

The final version of Scientific Linux 6.6, a recompiled Red Hat Enterprise Linux put together by various labs and universities around the world, has been released and is now available for download.

The developers of Scientific Linux 6.6 are still tracking the development of Red Hat Enterprise and upgraded their system after the RHEL OS reached version 6.6. This is probably the last update in the series, but Scientific Linux releases are pretty rare and the distros are quite stable. It's very likely that only the 7.x branch of this interesting operating system will be maintained properly after RHEL 6.x reaches end of life.

Scientific Linux goes through quite a few development versions and the same happened with this one. It doesn't bring anything spectacular, but most of the components in the system have been updated and synced with the upstream release. They had some issues with booting the OS on UEFI powered PCs, but the devs seem to have fixed those problems.

Scientific Linux 6.6 is powerful and stable

Despite what you might think about this operating system, it's not packed with all sorts of applications for "scientific purposes." Granted, the DVD edition does have some interesting apps, but its makers’ goal is to provide an extremely stable platform that can run all required apps. Scientific Linux fits this bill perfectly, despite the fact that it has a desktop experience from a decade ago.

As you can expect, those already using this operating system can easily upgrade from one version to another if they really want to. The procedure is pretty straightforward and it should present no significant problems. There is a caveat though.

"Users of proprietary drivers may experience issues with the X server loading due to changes between Xorg 1.13 and Xorg 1.15. Users of the 32bit iscsi utilities on x86_64 systems may experience multilib complaints. The 32bit iscsi utilities are not provided by upstream on x86_64 platforms. We have removed them from 6.6 to follow their behavior," note the devs in the announcement.

Like most updates that have landed so far for Scientific Linux, the latest one covers the same basic stuff, meaning newer packages, and a lot of bug fixes, most of them from upstream.

A complete list of changes and updates can be found in the official announcement for the regular distribution. You can download Scientific Linux 6.6 right now from Softpedia, but a Live version is available as well.

Scientific Linux 6.6 (6 Images)

Scientific Linux 6.6 desktop
Scientific Linux 6.6 file managerScientific Linux 6.6 launcher
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