The OpenELEC developers have just announced the availability of the second Beta build towards the OpenELEC 7.0 operating system, which is a major version due for release later this spring.
According to the release notes, OpenELEC 7.0 Beta 2 has been rebased on the Release Candidate of the upcoming Kodi 16.1 open-source media center software, includes Bluetooth Audio support, re-adds the OpenVPN packages, and introduces a new AMDGPU graphics driver for AMD Radeon GPUs.
"The OpenELEC 7.0 Beta 2 (internal version 6.95.2) release has been published. Users running OpenELEC 6.95.1 with auto-update enabled will be prompted on-screen to reboot and apply the update once it has been downloaded and enabled in some hours," reads today's announcement.
Updated WLAN drivers and firmware, new software versions
In addition to the major new features mentioned above, OpenELEC 7.0 Beta 2 updates most of the WLAN drivers and firmware, along with the Intel graphics driver, and merges the Nvidia driver with the Nvidia Legacy one to offer users support for old and modern Nvidia GPUs alike.
Most of the core components have been updated to their latest versions at the moment of writing this article. Among them, we can mention ALSA 1.1.0, Binutils 2.26, GCC 5.3, Glibc 2.23, Python 2.7.11, LLVM 2.8, Mesa 11.2 RC, FFmpeg 2.8, libva 1.7, Connman 1.31, libnfs 1.10, libressl 2.2, systemd 229, and X.Org Server 1.18.
The distribution also moves to the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel, which has been upgraded from the 4.1 branch. Other than that, the WeTek Core platform is now supported as a separate build, which appears to be the best for Android TV boxes. The entire changelog from the Beta 1 release has been attached below for more details.
In the meantime, you can download the OpenELEC 7.0 Beta 2 images right now via our website and take the operating system for a test drive on your supported devices. Please remember that this is a pre-release version, not suitable for use in production environments.
