Hello everyone. We have new development snapshots for those of you who would like to give them a spin.
As usual, please keep in mind these are experimental, yada yada. May cause damage, loss, grief, and so on.
Common changes
On both ORx and Lighthouse the snapshots include:
Fixes for FSAL
Fix for twitter app indexing glitch
Content analytics tracking
New “Settings” section in the settings page (yes, “Yo dawg, we heard u like settings…”) which allows you to turn the analytics off and change the default UI language
Note that you will see the language wizard step pop up again right after booting these snapshots. This is normal.
Lighthouse-specific changes
Lighthouse now has the ability to retain SSH user password if it’s changed. This should be good news for those of you that wish to expose the SSH port to the Internet.
To change the password, ssh into the receiver and use the passwd command.
(ORx could do this since several releases ago.)
ORx-specific change
ORx-specific changes are bit more substantial this time. The new card image format means that you cannot simply update an existing card. You will need to use a tool like Gparted to remove all partitions on the card or get a new card.
With the new format, all you need to do to create a new ORx card is to unzip the contents of the zip file to the card. And that’s pretty much it.
After having used the receiver for a while, you will find two new files and one new folder on the card if you put it in a computer:
data.img - databases and logs
persist.img - persistent configuration
DOWNLOADS - the files downloaded from Outernet
With future releases there will also be no difference between creating new cards and updating existing ones. It’ll just be a matter of copying the new files over the old ones.
Hi Branko - - Lighthouse Version 2.6a3 loaded as described in Wiki without any problems. All content reappeared as expected. Will watch for anomalies. Ken
Ok, so first 2.6 release candidate images are being uploaded for both ORx and LH. The following changes are included in addition to the list in the first post:
Help text is now shown below settings in the new “Settings” block
Fix for Internet detection code in the analytics package
ONDD fix that resolves issues with some large USB sticks
I got Lighthouse version 2.6rc1 loaded now. It looks as you pictured it.
I presume turning off the analytic setting stops sending the “heart beat” status data. This makes sense for folks out in the field who pay by the bit for their internet connectivity. I don’t worry about that at home, but I know (for example) in the Bahamas using 3G cellular internet costs $20 per megabit! That’s over 100 times the cost in Europe on 3G cellular. Ken
To clarify, analytics is not the same as heartbeat. We still haven’t added the option of turning heartbeat off.
Analytics sends us actual file usage statistics, including the number of times files are accessed, and the way they are accessed (download vs read, etc). This data helps us determine what kind of content is interesting to the end user, and it also allows us to collect information we need when talking to potential clients and investors.
Given there could be users that do not like this, though, we added the option of turning it off. Even though the data does not allow us to tell who is using the receiver, it still lets us know where this receiver may be located, and how many different users are using it, which may appear as too intrusive to more sensitive users.
In the next release, we will be adding the option to turn off heartbeat, among other things.
