Librarian 0.1b1 - first beta release

Othernet Software
1

We have just released the first beta version of Librarian after a long streak of alpha releases.

New features

The beta contains a few noteworthy new features:

  • Ability to execute shell scripts from within the file browser (see notes below)
  • Apps for Librarian (example app coming soon)
  • UI translations

Bugfixes

Those of you who have experienced (and are still experiencing) issues with bad zipiles in the content directory will be happy to know that this has been fixed in the beta. Sorry about the annoying bug, though, and thanks for your patience!

UI translations

Another happy news is we have started integrating translations. Most of the UI is available in Arabic, Danish, German, English, Spanish, French, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Serbian, Swedish, Tamil, Turkish, and Chinese. Note that some of the translations might not work just yet, though, but contributors are working on ironing out these.

We thank all the contributors who have worked on the translation on the great job they’ve done so far!

Updating

If you have not built your receiver yet, the install scripts are already patched to download the latest version, so no worries there.

Those who have already built the receivers will find the updated zipball and tarball in the usual location /var/spool/downloads/updates/. You can also download them from ORx project page.

To update run the following command:

pip install /var/spool/downloads/updates/librarian-0.1b1.tar.gz

To update from web, run this command:

pip install http://outernet-project.github.io/orx-install/librarian-0.1b1.tar.gz

Then restart Librarian:

# Arch Linux
systemctl restart librarian

# Raspbian/RaspBMC
service librarian restart

Running scripts from within the file browser

The Files section now gives users the ability to run shell scripts. In future, this will allow us to send scripts that update the system, rather than having users do it manually. The scripts are run as root user (so scripts that update the system need root privileges), so it definitely opens up a possible attack vectors. We’ll do our best to keep bad scripts out of your devices, but know that running scripts you don’t know about may compromise your system.

2

When I upgraded to 0.1b1, I noticed that the Apps menu option did not have its icon to the left of the name. Checking the screen.css file, there was no entry for .apps. Manually adding it and pointing it to apps.png made the icon display successfully.

3

Thanks. Beta 2 release is just around the corner, though, so please be patient. If you can’t wait, you can upgrade manually using the master branch (it should be pretty stable… for a beta anyway).

If you want to upgrade manually, you will need to make sure there’s Python 2.7 and pip for Python 2.7 installed, as well as libev-dev (or libev on Arch). For Raspbian, I think Python 2.7 is default. For Arch ARM, you need python2 and python2-pip packages. I won’t go into details since I’ll do a proper release announcement next week anyway.

Also, possibly today, I’ll release a test image that people can use to create 8GB (or larger) SD cards with Arch Linux ARM and ORx software.

Finally, you can see the new Beta version in action here.

EDIT: Since I’m talking about beta 2, here’s a teaser:

  • New awesome interface
  • New translations (some still broken and/or incomplete, unfortunately)
  • New C-based asynchronous web server, bjoern, for much better multi-user performance
  • User content tagging
  • Ability to remove individual content that is already in the archive
2 Likes
4

Awesome! I’ll definitely wait for the b2 release. I’ve got a spare SD card so I’ll definitely test out your pre-built image.

5

Thanks