Originally published at: https://www.freepbx.org/freepbx-distro-7-beta-release/
We are pleased to announce the beta release of the next FreePBX Distro. This is a huge leap forward in our distro releases. We would like to encourage early adopters to play with it and test it to ensure we have a solid platform to build FreePBX upon in the future. The new FreePBX distro is built on top of the Sangoma 7 distro, which is derived from CentOS 7.
Some significant highlights of the new distro include:
- No more FreePBX Distro Updater scripts. It's just 'yum update'. Always. You can also 'yum downgrade', too. (This, of course, doesn't change FreePBX's module versions, as usual. This is just Distro, and replaces the previous complexity of having to run multiple sequential upgrade scripts.) A forthcoming module will make this even simpler, removing the dependence on Sysadmin to do operating system upgrades.
- Complete UEFI support for installation and operation.
- Serial and USB installs are now much easier! In fact, it's much faster to install from USB than from ISO! So much so that - depending on your feedback - installing from USB may become the recommended method of installation, with ISOs as the secondary installation method.
- A better development environment. If you want to develop FreePBX, you can just run 'yum install freepbx-devel' to prepare most of the development environment.
- Behind the scenes, all package updates are automated. This makes it a lot easier for us to rapidly and reliably push out fixes without needing to run multiple different steps to replicate to all the CDNs.
- PHP 5.6.24 and FreePBX 14
You can download the ISO directly from our mirrors, or via BitTorrent for fastest downloads using this magnet link, or, this torrent file
If you find issues with the distro, you can report a bug at issues.freepbx.org. Select the “FreePBX Distro 7” project, or simply click on this link to go there directly.
Please note: We are tracking installations as part of this ISO. We are recording how long it took to install, the CPU type, speed, and the number of CPU cores, the amount of RAM, and the size of the disks. We are doing this so we know where to spend more effort in the development of FreePBX and the FreePBX Distro. These statistics are anonymized. No personally identifiable information is available. If you do not wish this data to be collected, please do not connect your machine to the internet while installing.
Please join us at FreePBX World and give us your feedback on both the distro and FreePBX face-to-face. Visit http://freepbxworld.com for more information and to register.