So from mid of February 2019 XBian images are build with Kodi v18 Leia. It should be noted, that images for i.MX6 (Hummingboard, Cubox-i) still have Kodi 17.6 included, and the reason is because i.MX6 support has been removed from Kodi sources a couple of months ago.

Our next step will be exchanging kernel 4.14 with 4.19. As already noted here at the forum, BTRFS LZ4 compression support has been removed due to run-time issues and conflicting with ZSTD compression, which has been included with kernel 4.14.
The consequence is, that on older installations kernel 4.19 can not be installed without removing LZ4 compression.

Starting of February 21st 2019, latest 4.14 kernel version is built into stable repository and 4.19 version will be built into staging instead of devel repository.

In the future, 4.14 kernels will not be built anymore.

XBian is not falling behind of course so the latest version has been built on Kodi 18. At this short moment is still available in staging repository only. If all goes well in hands of our developers, this should be available widely from our stable repository by end of the next week.

As I was writing this article all was checked and two major issues has been fixed [issue 1 ; issue 2]

And another feature brought by our main developer is the automatic version check/build function. So in the future, ~ALPHA and ~BETA tagged Kodi versions are automatically built to devel repo, ~RC tagged versions built to staging repo and final versions automatically to stable repo. All this new build feature  was added in two days ago 08/02/2019
Before I have to check, if stable repositories are ready for Kodi v18 final
(means that all needed libraries are available in stable repo).

And as always, enjoy your favourite media centre and if anything please feel free to discuss, give as a feedback and maybe a little donation to help us keep it up and running

XBian as ‘bleeding edge’ distribution, always follows Kodi very closely and when ever is save to do we bring these updates to you.

So if you are ready now is a time to try. Just enable your staging development repository under XBian settings and check for updates.

And as always, stay safe and make sure you have a backup of your working system before you do so.

These latest test builds are available to download for you.

• How to get it?
  1. You have to enable devel repo
  2. Refresh package list
  3. Install (upgrade) all available packages

• Some useful hints
  1. Make sure that you have latest xbian-package-config-shell installed
     At least 20180116-0 is required
  2. The helper script script.module.inputstreamhelper needs already loaded loop module
     This is already fixed but probably not available yet for download. So make sure that loop module is loaded before you’re upgrading libwivedine

It should be noted that those test builds are available for Raspberry Pi 0-3 only!

Please follow our dedicated thread in our forum if you have any questions, would like to leave your feedback or discuss further.

We appreciate all your support which help us to make things even better.

Thank you

Upgrade process works as follows:

1. xbian-package-repo supplies a helper script (/usr/local/sbin/xbian-update-repo) which modifies sources.list and xbian.list. This script is only installed if system is still running under Debian Jessie
2. xbian-config GUI checks if this script is present and if not already running Stretch, it opens a message box to indicate a Distribution upgrade is available
3.  In that case, xbian-config GUI has a new function in category Update, which starts Distribution upgrade
4. When you start this operation, above script will be called, and after that a apt-get dist-upgrade will be executed.
   It should be noted that this operation usually takes a long time, and a system backup before running this command is recommended
5. After a successfully upgrade, this helper script is not longer needed and will be removed

Transmission
The binaries are longer part of the package, now the original Debian built binaries or XBian’s backported packages for Jessie are used instead. And, of course, some enhancements has been added to the package, see description of this commit

Debian Stretch
From now on all new images are built with Debian Stretch, updating procedure for already existing Jessie installations will be put online some days later. The latest built images containing Jessie (end of June built) are kept for download, and binaries are still build for Jessie and Stretch (until end of this year), so it’s not very urgent to upgrade to Stretch immediately

New version of VNC package has been updated in our repositories and @Nachteule, one of our developers posted detailed information about it.

Please read his post in our forum>>>

Kodi Krypton 17.1 has been released, built to stable repository and is ready for update. Images containing 17.1 are in place from last Friday.

And also NOOBS gets update to 2.3 available now.

Enjoy, and as usual, if you feel you like to discuss and give a feedback come to our forum