A single distro from now on!

Setup, Configuration and Use News & Important Changes
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All,

Today we again have a major update of the openHAB distro.
I worked heavily on a bigger refactoring during the last days, which resulted in a single distro, so that users no longer have to choose between online and offline distro.

You can find the snapshot builds on our Jenkins at Cloudbees - it is now simply called openhab-2.0.0-SNAPSHOT.zip/tar.gz. If you download this, it will behave the same way as the online distro before, i.e. it does not include any add-ons, but will load them on demand from our online repository. Previously, add-ons and their dependencies were loaded from all kinds of different repos (repo.ecllipse.org, repo1.maven.org, jcenter.com, bintray.com, etc), which led to a slow and instable installation process, because some repos were not reliable and all of them were queried for the files. The new version now fetches everything from a single dedicated repo from Bintray, which makes add-on installation extremely fast now (assuming you have a good Internet bandwidth).

For the ones that loved the offline distro (like myself): There is an easy way to get it back! Just additionally download the file openhab-addons-2.0.0-SNAPSHOT.kar and place it in your local addons/ folder - this will immediately make all add-ons available offline and you can safely deactivate the online repo access (in addons.cfg or through the Paper UI). You can even do the same now with the legacy add-ons (which were only available online before) - simply download the openhab-addons-legacy-2.0.0-SNAPSHOT.kar and put it into the addons/ folder.

Note: The new Debian/APT package is just being worked on - @theo will give an update on what this new distro means for APT users; as the build of these packages is now decoupled from the distro build, you will currently still find the last “old” build in the apt repo.

Besides this structural change, there are also noteworthy functional enhancements. A new stable ESH build is used in the distro, which addressed this long list of issues. This ranges from many small bug fixes to corrected character encoding (e.g. for German Umlauts) in the UIs and new filtering mechanisms for inbox and things in the Paper UI. One breaking change to mention for everyone using bookmarks: The Paper UI is not anymore at /ui, but now at /paperui. The dashboard has obviously been adjusted accordingly already.

Speaking of the dashboard: The initial setup wizard now also links to a description of the different initial packages, which might be of interest for some of you.

Last but not least I would like to mention that a few new bindings have been added recently as well: These are the Kodi binding, the Russound binding, the AllPlay binding, the CoolMasterNet binding, the Silvercrest Wifi Plug binding and the GlobalCache binding. Many thanks to all the contributors for these additions and also thanks to all contributors that are still patiently waiting to have their bindings reviewed and merged - I am well aware that there is still a long queue, but I’ll do my best to make further progress on it.

Best regards,
Kai

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And the changes are now available for apt-get users! Remember if you haven’t done so already make sure you change to the Bintray Repo as @theo has explained.

Install

As always, be sure to take a backup! but all you need to do is install using the new package name. This will automatically uninstall openhab2-online or openhab2-offline and replace it with this version:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install openhab2

Note: Sometimes, the installation would ask you if you would like to replace single configuration files. If you’re unsure what the file is and it’s located in the /var/lib/openhab2/etc folder then answer should be yes (Y) (the default for deb packages is no however).

Getting the Add ons

If like @Kai you loved the offline distro, you can optionally download and install the add-on or the legacy add-on using:

sudo apt-get install openhab2-addons
sudo apt-get install openhab2-addons-legacy

Update

Then, you can keep all three updated at any time with the commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Report any problems

Let us know here of any problems you come across which are specific to the deb packages!

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And one more piece of good news: The new package is now also used in openHABian.

The openhab2 package (the “online” version) will be installed on fresh systems. Nothing to pay attention to there.

If you are already using openHABian, just execute sudo openhabian-config, then select “Update” followed by “openHAB 2”. This will transition your setup over from the cloudbees repository to bintray and from openhab2-offline to openhab2. Just as @Benjy mentioned you will be prompted about 1-2 changed files in /var/lib/openhab2/etc. Select yes.

Thanks to @Kai, @Benjy and @theo for this great work!

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Thanks all for the new single distro! Worked like a charm for me - I’m using openHABian. Just did the described steps and everything worked as planned. Thanks again!

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A virgin install on a fresh RPi2 B running latest Raspbian goes through install but does not write to log or listen 20+ minutes after start. Opened issue:

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I did the change over to the new repository. Everything appeared to be working, until I rebooted. OpenHAB2 is now not loading when I reboot. How can I reset this up? I am running it on a RPI3.

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Hi Mike, is it not initiating a start or is it failing when it tries?

If it’s simply not starting on boot, then try reloading the service information:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable openhab2.service
sudo systemctl start openhab2.service

Otherwise, can you let me know openHAB related errors are in your /var/log/daemon.log or /var/log/openhab2/openhab.log?

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It was not starting when I rebooted. When I ran the commands you listed it fixed it. When I rebooted it starts right up. Thank you for your help!!!

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… Proving my point from earlier :wink:

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For my clear understanding, in which kar is a binding such as the MiOS binding (or the weather binding)?

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All in the “normal” kar.
You can see the legacy add-ons defined in here.

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I’d like to request an announcement here similar to @Benjy’s when the Docker image gets updated as well. I notice the build is failing and at least the README.md hasn’t been updated. I’m not sure who maintains the Docker Image, I hope they see this.

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Should be a simple case of removing the “flavours” and changing the download location in the build. I don’t know enough about docker to change this myself, but could you raise an issue for that in the docker repo?

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@cniweb

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Done:

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Bummer!!!
Homematic 1.9 binding is not installed and does not appear in paper ui.

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Just the same as for the past 6 months since Homematic 2.0 has been merged… You will therefore find when activating legacy bindings (it is in there as you can see from the link posted above).

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Do you configure the homematic binding with suffix “1”, as you should since a couple of releases ago?
All 1.9 bindings must be configured with a trailing “1”, to have a differenciator from the 2.x bindings within openHAB2.