forum.excito.org

Hi Guys,

We know all of you at Excito are very passionate about your system and are working on developments, but I have noticed a note of impatience and frustration in a lot of threads on the forums.

People are getting fed up of waiting for WiFi to be available. If you keep telling people soon, then nothing happens, it just annoys people. If what you have is not all whistles and bells yet, tell people. Most of us would be happy to accept a more limited set of functionality as a first release.
You say you are working on updates, but no replies are given when people ask you about what and when. For example, when will we see Lenny as Etch is going to EOL soon.
No comments from your team when one of the forum users offers to help you write a GUI update for the back-end. A large number of people are very enthusiastic about this re-write from the screen-shots.
Two months ago you promised to add a list of all services and ports to your website, so people had a reference, but nothing has happened yet.

With the large number of Linux savvy developers and designers on the forum, I see a very real danger of the OS level components being forked by the community and taken out of your direct control, which would be a great shame I think.

Let us help you out if possible.

Can you please publish a statement of where you are, what is being worked on and when people can expect to see things, with realistic timelines.

Asparak

+1

Some kind of response would be nice

+1

+2

+3

Hi all,

Warning, long post ahead.

I really understand that you are getting frustrated by the wlan situation. Its almost a year late and i can only apologize for this I will try to summarize the status in this reply and being as honest as possible.

Regarding wlan, as said before, our main problem we had was that we wanted to support 802.11N when releasing the wlan-addon. And the drivers for the Atheros (The chip we use) wlan cards we aimed to use where nowhere stable for a long time. During this time we where, due to low man count, forced to focus on other features such as Raid and Backup functionality.

We do now actually see things stabilizing on the driver front. Thus we hoped for a Christmas release. Unfortunately it now seems like that any commercial release still is a few weeks away (4-6 weeks as an educated guess). We have system that do work quite stable, at least in G mode (54Mb/S). All this is available in our unstable repo atm.

But since there seems to be a deeper interest in development of this, which we do appreciate i was thinking in doing an arrangement like this:

The first 20 persons that would be willing to try this out, as a beta test with no guarantees on stability, and paying a "cost price" for the gears, approximately 30€ including freight, contact me via private message on the forum and i will se to it that you will receive a kit with a wlan card, antennas and a new back plane (IE, you need to own a Bubba|Two for this). In return Excito would like feedback on what works and what does not.

I hope this sounds interesting enough.

Regarding Etch vs Lenny, this is a tougher issue. I understand that this is a high priority when installing, one self, new software on Bubba and keeping the same one up2date. We notice this ourself when working with the base system. If you look into our repo you will see that most packages are back ported from Lenny or even newer than that.

The solutions for this or how we could migrate to Lenny has two answers (That i can think of).

We can branch the main system and keep one etch based system and one based on Lenny. This is unfortunately a solution that Excito wont be able to maintain and support with the revenue from the said product.

The other solution is to guarantee that a system upgrade (dist upgrade) will work for, at least everyone with a base install. That would end up with a single new system based on lenny for all new and old customers. This would be a way forward to lenny but atm we have no time to do this migration and testing.

So to summarize that we will try to get resources for a migration. But I/Excito can't even promise when.

Regarding comments on Kamiel's UI work. That's unfortunate that we did not reply in the forum. I have done so this night. We actually e-mailed him when we saw what he had done. And hopefully this will lead to something that benefits everyone.

Regarding the promise of a list of services I'm sorry this has completely passed me by. Could you please give me a link on that and i will try resolving that.

And regarding community, a direct fork would indeed be a waste of resources. That said Excito are definitely interested in all community activity that could be built up around Excitos Bubba product line and will try supporting this as much as we can.

So please let us know what You think would be the best way to encourage this. We will try getting a Wiki up and running asap (That has been in the works for quite some time). Beyond that, if anyone would start an IRC channel, I know that at least me and probably Carl would hang around there. Anyone interested in an mailinglist? Please let us know.

And to answer your last request for a statement. What is being worked at right now?

Priority right now is getting the wlan feature out the door. We have some work left in the UI part, some parts regarding N configuration, dual band operation, and testing of the same. (Note however that we are still not 100% satisfied with the current driver status. So any major setback there will affect the release of the wlan addon)

After that the goal is a general UI cleanup and hopefully a rewrite of the web based filemanager. Both these activities would hopefully be done by end of January.

I hope this gives some clue in what Excito's is doing right now and hopefully some insight on what is happening behind the "front". Please comment.

/Tor

Hi Tor,

Thanks very much for that. Helps to see where you are and the direction you are going. More than happy to test the Wifi and PM'd you on that. Myself and Fourwinds are SysAdmins for a living so we have considerable experience in Linux and Unix. Fourwinds is unfortunately on vacation till January so if you send me 2 sets, I'll pay for his and he can help out as well.

I think the only viable option would be a Lenny upgrade, rather than 2 branches. People can then choose to keep their box on Etch or take the upgrade path.

http://forum.excito.net/viewtopic.php?f ... 80&start=0 is the thread which Carl responded to about the list of ports etc.

Don't use IRC much, but a dev mailing list might be an idea, so people who are willing to take the risk can help you testing features.

Hi Tor

thanks for the reply.
I have no direct need for a wlan option,
but i am interested in forwarding the Bubba product
and willing to help and test with lenny or front-end,etc
I don't use IRC, but news or dev-mail would be great.

Interested in that wlan option and sent a pm.
Sent it december 22 but it´s still in the outbox,guess tor is celebrating christmas!

This seems like as good a place to post this as any.

I've had my B2 for a few months now. I've pretty much got all the built in functionality working as I want and in the last few weeks I've started to see what else I can do with it.

The problem is, nearly every time I find something I'm interested in installing I find that any required dependencies in the repos are out of date. If it's a fairly minor package we're talking about I'll happily get the source of a more recent version and compile it. However, if (as is quite common) it's something "core" like perl or php I'm very wary of updragding it in case I break anything current or any future updates from Excito.

My experience this weekend has been typical. I wanted to install davical but got into dependency hell with that, postgresql, php and perl even when carefully selecting older versions of both postgresql and davical to install.

If there's going to be relatively few updates for the B2 in the future I'll probably think about taking my chances. However, if a few months down the line you're going to be rolling out an upgrade to Lenny I'll have to sit on my hands for a bit.

So I guess I'm asking what's on the horizon.