Scientific Linux 7.8 has already been released, know its most important changes

The new version of the Linux distribution "Scientific Linux 7.8" has already been released and comes with various improvements of which the inclusion of some new packages that come to improve some things in the system. This new version of Scientific Linux 7.8 is built on the basis of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.8 package and complemented by tools intended for use in scientific institutions.

For those unfamiliar with Scientific Linux, they should know that this is a Linux distribution binary level clone of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution, compiled from RHEL source code, under the terms of the RHEL EULA and the GPL license. It is maintained by the CERN, Fermilab, DESY and ETH Zürich laboratories.

The differences regarding RHEL they generally boil down to rebranding and removal of links to Red Hat services. Application-specific applications, as well as additional drivers, are provided for installation from external repositories such as EPEL and elrepo.org.

At first the project was baptized as High Energy Physics Linux, becoming Scientific Linux, since it was widely adopted by the scientific community in general.

This distribution is used in the Large Hadron Collider, for the machines of the GCH computer network.

Scientific Linux 7.8 Key New Features

In this new version of Scientific Linux 7.8 Arrives based on RHEL 7.8 y introduces some changes to files with repositories configuration external (EPEL, ELRepo, SL-Extras, SL-SoftwareCollections, ZFSonLinux) which were moved to a centralized repositoryas these repositories are not specific to specific versions and can be used with any version of Scientific Linux 7.x.

To download data about repositories, just run "yum install yum-conf-repos" and then configure the individual repositories, for example, "yum install yum-conf-epel yum-conf-zfsonlinux yum-conf- softwarecollections yum-conf-hc yum-conf-extras yum-conf -elrepo «.

On the other hand we can find some changes in the packages, since in this new version Python 3.6 is added since previously Python 3 was not part of RHEL and also the 2.x branch was discontinued.

We can also find the package with OpenAFS, an open implementation of the Andrew File System distributed file system, the SL_gdm_no_user_list package which disables the display of the user list in GDM if it is necessary to comply with a stricter security policy, the SL_enable_serialconsole package to configure a console that works through a serial port and the package SL_no_colorls which disables color output in ls.

Changes were made to packages, mainly related to rebranding: anaconda, dhcp, grub2, httpd, ipa, kernel, libreport, PackageKit, pesign, plymouth, redhat-rpm-config, shim, yum, cockpit.

Compared to the Scientific Linux 6.x branch, the packages alpine, SL_desktop_tweaks, SL_password_for_singleuser, yum-autoupdate, yum-conf-adobe, thunderbird (available in the EPEL7 repository) are excluded from the backbone.

The components (shim, grub2, the Linux kernel) uUsed when booting in UEFI Secure Boot mode are signed by Scientific Linux key, which, when enabling verified boot, requires manual operations, since the key must be added to the firmware;

To install updates automatically, the yum-cron system is used, instead of yum-autoupdate.

By default, updates are applied automatically followed by a notification to the user. To change the behavior at the automated installation stage, the SL_yum-cron_no_automated_apply_updates (prohibits automatic installation of updates) and SL_yum-cron_no_default_excludes (enables installation of kernel updates) packages are prepared.

Download Scientific Linux 7.8

If you want to download the image from this system to be able to install on your computer or to be able to test under a virtual machine, You must go to the official website of the distribution and in its download section you will get the system image.

In that download section you can download the image with desktop environment or the other image that is to build the system to your needs.

The distribution image is provided for the x86_64 architecture, in the form of DVD packages (9.9 GB and 8.1 GB), as well as a shortened image for 627 MB network installation.

The link of download is this.