Scientific Linux 6.3 Beta 1 has been released

Pat Riehecky has announced the availability of the first beta version of Scientific Linux 6.3, a distribution built from source packages of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and enhanced with extra applications useful in academic environments: "There should be no expectation that a 'yum' upgrade to SL 6.3 will work. A new install is the recommended method to move from 'sl6rolling'(this alpha release) and the released 'SL 6.3'. Major changes the upstream vendor made: LibreOffice - OpenOffice.org has been replaced with LibreOffice. The LibreOffice packages 'provide' the right packages to maintain compatibility for Kickstart and yum installs; Anaconda - Anaconda now alerts users to the beta status of a release when it is tagged appropriately, upstream has added this functionality and we are taking advantage of it for the beta cycle...."

 

Scientific Linux is a recompiled Red Hat Enterprise Linux, co-developed by Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). Although it aims to be fully compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it also provides additional packages not found in the upstream product; the most notable among these are various file systems, including Cluster Suite and Global File System (GFS), FUSE, OpenAFS, Squashfs and Unionfs, wireless networking support with Intel wireless firmware, MadWiFi and NDISwrapper, Sun Java and Java Development Kit (JDK), the lightweight IceWM window manager, R - a language and environment for statistical computing, and the Alpine email client.