Users can download Scientific Linux 7.1 RC2 today

Apr 7, 2015 23:10 GMT  ·  By

Pat Riehecky from the Scientific Linux development team has announced today, April 7, the immediate availability for download and testing of the second and last Release Candidate (RC) version of the forthcoming Scientific Linux 7.1 operating system.

While Scientific Linux 7.1 RC2 is just a small milestone that fixes the last remaining bugs, the development team prepares for the unveiling of the final release of the anticipated computer operating system on April 13, 2015, if everything goes according to the release plan.

Scientific Linux 7.1 will be based on the upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.1 operating system, and will include a significant number of new features, assorted improvements, numerous updated packages, and many bugfixes.

Here's what's new in Scientific Linux 7.1

Based on the already published release notes, we can report today that Scientific Linux 7.1 offers users easy access to the ZFS on Linux project via YUM repositories that have been integrated in the distribution, OpenAFS 1.6.11, IPA customizations, GRUB boot splash improvements, the 7.1 release repositories, and initial support for UEFI Secure Boot.

Unfortunately, the team was not able to provide full support for booting and installing the Scientific Linux 7.1 operating system on UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) systems with Secure Boot. As such, users are instructed to sign the Scientific Linux certificate manually using the "mokutil" command, in order to enroll it into the MOK (Machine Owner Key) database.

Those of you who want to test the last development release of the upcoming operating system can download Scientific Linux 7.1 Release Candidate 2 right now from Softpedia, where it is distributed as a 64-bit ISO image. We remind you that this is an unstable operating system, thus not suitable for deployment in production environments where stability is essential.