On February 5, 2016, Pat Riehecky of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory was extremely proud to announce the release and immediate availability for download of the final Scientific Linux 7.2 installation images.

The development cycle of Scientific Linux 7.2 tracked the one of the upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.2 operating system, on which the project is based since it was born back in May 2004. The distro is in fact built from the freely distributed source RPM packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Scientific Linux 7.2 brings all the goodies and the latest GNU/Linux technologies from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2 operating system, which is the most advanced RHEL branch at the moment of writing this article, removing any trademarks and proprietary elements, thus making it free to use for any science lab in the world.

What's new in Scientific Linux 7.2

Scientific Linux 7.2 comes after two RC (Release Candidate) builds, bringing numerous up-to-date core components and applications. Also new to Scientific Linux 7.2 is the migration of the external repositories to a central location as they're not specific to individual releases of the distribution.

The yum-fastest-mirror plugin was implemented in the install media of Scientific Linux 7.2, which promises to speed up the network installs by quickly discovering the closest mirror to your location, and Scientific Linux Contexts was added to allow science labs to create local custom configurations specific to their computing needs.

Last but not least, the OpenAFS package has been updated to version 1.6.16, the behaviour of the yum package manager saw some modifications, some build issues were addressed, and numerous bugs squashed. Download Scientific Linux 7.2 right now via Softpedia, where you'll find 64-bit ISOs.