CentOS 7 Distro

Distro Discussion & Help
1

For those that have been watching Git (and who hasn’t, everyone loves looking at commits, right?) you would have seen some commits hinting at the release of the new FreePBX Distro 7.

This is getting pretty close to being available for beta, and we’ve been using it internally for a while.

I expect that, barring anything catastrophic, there will be the first public release very soon - early to middle of next week.

There’s a couple of changes from our previous Distros that I’d like to mention, that will probably get filled out more in a blog post, but here’s a couple of the cool new hotness things that I’m happy about

  1. No more FreePBX Distro Updater scripts. It’s just ‘yum update’. Always. You can also ‘yum downgrade’, too. (This doesn’t change FreePBX’s module versions, as per normal. This is just Distro)
  2. Complete UEFI support
  3. Serial and USB installs just work. (In fact, it’s much faster to install from USB than from ISO now – so much so that installing from USB may be the recommended method of installation, with ISOs as a fallback)
  4. Better development environment - If you want to develop FreePBX, you can just run ‘yum install freepbx-devel’ and that gets the machine ready for you.
  5. Behind the scenes, all RPM updates are automated, making it a lot easier for us to push out fixes without needing to run 15 different steps to push repos out to all the CDNs.
  6. PHP 5.6 and FreePBX 14

There are a couple of downsides. For one, there will no longer be any i686 support. 64 bit only. Being that it’s been impossible to buy 32 bit CPUs for almost 10 years now, we think that’s fair. Secondly, as this is a beta release, it will probably be broken in horrible and arcane ways. It may even kick your cat. No promises.

If you have any questions or suggestions, this is the place to post them!

5 Likes
2

If I use a Centos 7 32bit version and install manually FreePBX14 will the system work or no?

3

You are always free to do a straight install. We will not be releasing a 32bit version. That said we don’t have an ARM version either. As long as you can get all the dependencies compiled on your selected architecture freepbx should do fine.

4

If you manually install CentOS, then that isn’t related to Distro. THIS - Distro - is about getting everything working as quickly and simply as possible for an end user.

5

looks like we need to get started upgrade those older systems still running the 32 architecture. do you know if there are any issues with taking a 32 backup and then restoring it on a 64 bit install?

6

As far as I know, no. There were some issues, in the past, but as long as you’re running the latest FreePBX 13, you should be able to backup and restore between architectures without any problems.

7

Will the Distro be using Scientific Linux 6 or 7? (Never mind… just saw the title)

What is your hoped for Beta Testing time frame, weeks or months?

Thanks