Robert Shingledecker has announced the release and immediate availability for download of the first Beta build of the upcoming Tiny Core Linux 7.0 computer operating system.

According to the release announcement, Tiny Core Linux 7.0 Beta 1 brings some of the latest software packages, including BusyBox 1.24.1, GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) 5.2.0, Glibc 2.22, e2fsprogs 1.42.13, and util-linux 2.27. Additionally, the distribution finally switches to a more recent kernel, Linux 4.2.7, which, unfortunately, is no longer supported (but is still maintained by Canonical).

"Team Tiny Core is pleased to announce that Tiny Core 7.0 Beta1 is available for public testing," says Robert Shingledecker. "This is an beta level cut. If you decide to help test, then please test carefully. We don't want anyone to lose data. Most extensions have been copied over from the 6.x repo - note that the alsa extensions have been refactored and updated and the Xorg-7.7 extensions have been updated."

As you can see from Mr. Shingledecker's quote above, Tiny Core Linux 7.0 Beta 1 ships with updated X.Org 7.7 extensions, as well as refactored ALSA extensions. The rest of the extensions have been copied from the repositories of Tiny Core Linux 6.0. Tiny Core users are being informed that they need new vmlinuz and core.gz (or rootfs.gz and modules.gz) files when using distribution files.

Of course, some issues remain unresolved in this release, which is why we don't recommend installing it in production environments. However, if you want to take it for a test drive, you can download the Live ISO images of Tiny Core Linux 7.0 Beta 1 for 64-bit or 32-bit hardware architectures right now from Softpedia.