The 5th minor update for ScientificLinux 7 (which is based on RHEL7) is now ready for deployment to the Informatics DICE office and student lab machines. A minor update like this provides us with the opportunity to update important software and fix any bugs which are not security issues (we apply security updates as soon as they are available) in a controlled manner.

Notable updates include a switch from VirtualBox 5.1 to 5.2, libreoffice is upgraded from 5.0.6.2 to 5.3.6.1, QT5 is upgraded from 5.6.2 to 5.9.2 and R is upgraded from 3.4.2 to 3.5.0. Along with the general updates this platform upgrade also provides a fully supported python 3 environment based on version 3.4.8 which includes the full “scientific python” stack of scipy, numpy, matplotlib, ipython, pandas, etc.

We plan to make this change on the evening of Monday 20th August. This has been scheduled so that it is after the exam resits have finished but still well before the start of Semester 1 so that teaching staff have sufficient time to test their course work. If you would like to have any of your DICE machines upgraded sooner that can be arranged, please get in touch.

SL7.5 was released on May 10th 2018 and since then it has been thoroughly tested in our DICE environment so we are confident that this update will not cause any issues for users.

Full details of the package updates are available on the LCFG wiki. For further, in depth information, there are also release notes from ScientificLinux and Redhat.

If you have any questions or problems with the upgrade please contact our User Support team using the support form.

Scientific Linux 7.5 Upgrade / Computing Systems by is licensed under a