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.

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

Our staging repository now uses Kodi 17.1 for those who would like to test it. You need to enable this in your settings!

Have a lovely weekend people

We are proud to inform that we are officially support it. It should be fully functional so lets try it out.

You can find it in our download section.

For further discussion please follow the forum thread and when you find serious bug please report to our github

Lets have some fun

The main difference is that we are working with constant apt-updates and because of that we have a rolling releases. In some distributions, constant updates, rolling releases and actual image releases are well combined.

In XBian we wanted to take this approach a little step further and drop these regular image versioning altogether.

Lately we have been discussing a new and simple version numbering system. What we have come up with is just a date format, which we think it would be the best. It is easily recognizable and you always see where you are with your release. When you already install the latest xbian-update you’ll see the version such as: XBian 20141231-2. These versions should soon be accompanied by a XBian_2014.12.31-2_rpi.img.gz and so on for direct download from our download page.

This means we dropped the Alpha, Beta and Nightly images.

Instead, we are going to release weekly images that are generated with the latest stable packages which people are using through apt updates.

Whenever serious bugs are reported in a weekly image, we will fix it and than wait for the next new one to arrive.

In case of new platforms such as CuBox-I and Hummingboard, we upload releases to sourceforge for manual download and testing but also these are available through the XBian-installer too. All this is be done automatically.

So with this system in place, you can always download the most up-to-date XBian version and it doesn’t matter if you upgrade your system or reinstall. You will always get the same version. If you would need to reinstall, just pick the latest image and start updating from there.

So the “XBian stable release” will actually never arrive in that sense, because we do have stable releases in place for a long time already