I hate to rain on everyone's parade, but the beta's installer is clearly broken. There are more problems than the following, but these two I think are the most pressing.
1. On first boot, two instances of LMCE_Launch_Manager are spawned and continually loop package installations while preventing the AVWizard from running. Both Merkur2k and I have been able to reproduce this multiple times. Unfortunately, someone new to LinuxMCE would probably not recognize that something is wrong because they don't know exactly what is supposed to happen.
2. Media director generation doesn't work. The bug in /usr/pluto/files.d/fstab-diskless was identified almost a week ago. The missing "release" from the avenard repo was identifed about the same time. The Diskless_CreateTBZ.sh script is also broken.
Yeah, I get it; it's a beta and there's going to be bugs. These bugs, though, are the type of things that make LinuxMCE look like a hassle, when it's really a very easy system to use. The last several builds may have introduced several fixes, but they have introduced major bugs as well. To be frank, I think it's pretty tacky that the beta was released before there was a chance to identify these bugs. I'm sure there are at least a few people (including myself) that would have helped test the dvd installer given the opportunity so we wouldn't be in the situation we are in right now. At minimum, I would expect that a newly released beta would be at least as functional as the preceding alpha.
Dlewis has done a fantastic job generating interest in the project; I would hate to see that turn into a negative by people getting frustrated during installation and never getting to see how wonderful the rest of the system is.
/rant
:Matt
