Hi all,
I hope that you are all enjoying LMCE as much as I tend to. I wanted to let everyone know about some pretty major changes that are occuring in the system. This is meant both to inform and to solicit feedback as we go forward.
To date the LinuxMCE system has been a bit of a pain to install. We have required an officilal installer script that you would run after installing ubuntu. It has long been a goal of mine (and others) to remove this requirement and make the system install more like a normal ubuntu package. Today we are very close to that. I am working vigorously towards the ability to simply 'apt-get install lmce-blah'. This allows us to more closely align with debian policies (something we want to do more of) and allows for easier integration into the ubuntu ecosystem.
I know that for some this could cause issues. I, and others, hope to minimize any issues that might occur. That doesn't mean that there won't be some 'growing pains' as we move forward. We urge anyone that is testing on 1204 (or 1404 if you are really brave) to provide feedback. IRC feedback is ideal but the forums here are a good place if you cannot access IRC. If something is determined to be a proper bug (as is often the case) we will have you (or one of us) file a ticket in trac. Trac is locked down for anonymous submits due to *massive* amounts of spam. We still want your bug reports and would be very happy to grant trac access to submit tickets and information (code submissions are still relegated to devs only).
Going forward the plan is to support simple installation through normal apt procedures. This would entail adding the lmce repo to the /etc/sources.list and then apt-get install blah package to install the remainder of LinuxMCE. Tests are so far very successful and in the next day or two we will ask others to begin testing this procedure. After that DVD installers will follow with the hopes that they too will work as easy (or easier) than they have been.
Many small install bugs are being squashed with regards to network setup and general installation. Hopefully we can improve the setup further to reduce any issues that people may experience. Some issues may be known, others not.
As always testing is really, really, appreciated. Please follow:
http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/LinuxMCE-1204_pre-alpha for changes to LinuxMCE packages.
Happy LinuxMCE'ing!
J.
