Good day everybody,

this is not about remote controlled sailing boats, or remote controlled cars.

This is about our LinuxMCE 810 RELEASE CANDIDATE.

Since middle of 2008, when PlutoHome stopped doing development for LinuxMCE, a chosen few have gone to great length, to take over LinuxMCE, and to produce the FIRST fully community maintained version of LinuxMCE. Hundreds upon hundreds of hours have been spend programming, bug hunting, user supporting, and documenting everything for LinuxMCE. We have had help from the fine folks at Dianemo namely totallymaxed and Uplink, where totallymaxed has been extremely helpful in the forum, and Uplink has helped on the development side with fixing stuff, only a developer with great insight into the code base and great coding skills could have done.

On the LinuxMCE team we started with most of the LinuxTag 2008 gang, but lost Zaerc and ddamron as well as danielk (even though he still comes by every now and then). We have attracted new developers, like merkur2k who helped tremendously on the webadmin site of things. Golgoj4, who has started out as a helpful hand in the IRC channel to support people, and went to become a real developer with doing most of the current development work in the qOrbiter range. Sambuca which closed out more bugs that I could have counted, especially in the Asterisk department, and as a very thorough tester of stuff. Foxi352 in the past couple of month has helped a lot in getting the iOS based orbiter of the ground, and is doing also great work in finding and fixing bugs,  and provided helpful scripts, patches and enhancements. Bongowongo, our merciless snapshot tester, who made sure we had a laugh every now and then, and countless others, who have come by.

Thanks to all of you.

 

Also especially great thanks go to hari and TSCHAK. While hari has been the master of getting home automation protocols into the LinuxMCE as soon as some one sent him an SDK and samples, be it KNX refinements, the full Z-Wave protocol, PLCBUS, EnOcean or DMX. TSCHAK has been THE person to come to for questions about the inner working, he is the person that knows the media plug-in architecture inside and out, and I do not know of ANYONE in the LinuxMCE world that has not been helped by TSCHAK to get things working. Thank you to you guys as well.

And with that, let me ask you all to test the release candidate, which has been lingering on our service providers page for a few days now. http://linuxmce.iptp.org/release/ contains our ISO image. Feel free to mirror it, and spread the word. We have a window of 2 weeks for bug fixing before going golden. Find the bugs, put them into trac at http://svn.linuxmce.org. When you do enter a bug ticket, make sure to REVISIT that ticket at least daily, in case there are questions from the devs about the ticket. In case any head hunter wants to get the real names of the individuals, feel free to login to IRC irc://freenode.net/linuxmce, or into our support forum at http://forum.linuxmce.org and contact them there.

The people that have worked on LinuxMCE have shown more energy and willingness to get this thing done, that I have ever seen in other projects. No money, no glory, and they kept at it for more than THREE years.

Thanks for listening.

Best regards,

Peer Oliver Schmidt
Release Manager LinuxMCE