For me, this is personal. Over the course of the last year and a half, I've been spending most of my waking time getting LinuxMCE to a new release. Together with Thom Cherryhomes and Harald Klein, without whom this would not have been possible, with Zaerc, who has created the initial building blocks upon we all stand now. With the help of all the testers and developers, whom I only know by their nicks, from sambuca, jondecker, uplink, and the countless others.

It is the 15th of October 2009. 10 month after my wedding anniversary, 8 month after the birthday of my oldest daughter. 6 month after the birthday of my youngest daugther, 4 month after the anniversary of the proposal.

We have a beta.

The last stumbling block was the DVD. People want to download a single image. With most if not all of the stuff available. This is now possible. The DVD allows you to download a single ISO image, install Kubuntu from it, and after the Kubuntu installation, double click the LinuxMCE installer icon on the desktop, authorize, and the installation will go, and install a hybrid on that system.

Are we bug free? No. We still have bugs. But we are more confident, that the system is ready for a larger audience. We will continue to close tickets in our trac system (and I urge people to file bugs, after verifying that the things they experience are not already logged in the tracker).

The URL for the bittorent of the DVD will be announced shortly. The installs using the new-installer and downloads over the net is working already.

People with existing alpha installs are free to just apt-get update and upgrade to get the latest and greatest packages. However, if you experience difficulties, please to a fresh install, to verify the problem has nothing to do with older stuff still laying around.

Thank you, to all, who have made this possible so far. And lets keep going to make the release as good as humanly possible.

Best regards

Peer Oliver Schmidt
Release Manager for
LinuxMCE 810