Again, a lot of work has been spent over the past 3 months since beta4 to stabilize the code and to bring in new features and improvements - it is by far more than I would be able to list here as there were almost 600 pull requests merged since beta4. This makes 200 per month, i.e. more than 6 every single day! This is really a vibrant community
But let me nonetheless name a few highlights:
There is a newly introduced welcome page on the very first start after a fresh installation. This makes it easier for beginners to choose a set of add-ons to start with (a detailed documentation of the packages will follow soon).
A new audio & voice infrastructure is in place, which now allows using text-to-speech engines on different outputs, such as Sonos speakers, Chromecast devices or Onkyo receivers - more to come!
The storage of Things, Items, etc. that are created through the Paper UI or HABmin is no longer done in the binary mapDB. Instead this is now stored as (human-readable) JSON, so that there is a chance to look into it, manipulate it if necessary and more easily create partial backups.
HABPanel has made a huge progress and it is no longer declared “experimental”, but is considered to be a well working dashboard UI for openHAB.
To eat my own dog food, I have switched my personal production environment at home to openHAB 2 in November and (like I have heard from many others) it is running stable and smooth since then. This makes me confident that we should have openHAB 2.0 released soon and recommend it to the whole community as a replacement of openHAB 1.x. Thus, I have agreed with the @maintainers that we would like to aim for January 22, 2017 for the openHAB 2.0 release! One of the major things that needs improvement is the documentation, though. @ThomDietrich has put a lot of effort into its structure and content, but you will still find many places that ask for contributions - so if you feel that you have some knowledge, which you would want to share there, please help improving the documentation!
With this, I would like to wish you all a Merry Christmas and would like to thank the whole openHAB community for their passion and enthusiasm about openHAB! Keep up the good work and let us all look together forward to a successful 2017!
@MikeH, definitely appears to be a temporary error accessing raspberrypi.org, not openHAB related at all (that package appears to be downloaded.
@Kai, Excellent news! I’m busy switching my (and my parents’ home) environments to OH2 as we speak! I hope to be able to contribute to the community myself, someday, but for now, Merry Christmas to you and keep up the great work on OH in the new year!
Also from me thanks to all the @maintainers for all the endless hours you’ve spent to create such a great piece of software!
Looking forward to upgrade to beta5 during the holiday season and play with it.
Happy and relaxing holidays!
What’s the difference between the ‘snapshot’ builds from http://www.openhab.org/getting-started/downloads.html vs this beta5 release posted to bintray? At this point, are the SNAPSHOT builds the equivalent of ‘beta5’ plus nightly/daily updates?
Since this last update I am having problems getting “https://myopenhab.org/” to work. The error from my browser is: 404 Not Found. My logs show that OpenHAB is continually disconnecting and reconnecting to the cloud. Any help would be appreciated.
[INFO ] [io.openhabcloud.internal.CloudClient] - Connected to the openHAB Cloud service (UUID = xxxx, base URL = http://localhost:8080)
2016-12-24 07:59:04.643 [ERROR] [io.openhabcloud.internal.CloudClient] - Socket.IO error: io.socket.engineio.client.EngineIOException: xhr poll error
2016-12-24 07:59:04.648 [INFO ] [io.openhabcloud.internal.CloudClient] - Disconnected from the openHAB Cloud service (UUID = xxxx, base URL = http://localhost:8080)
Thanks for the update
I updated from beta 4 to beta 5 via apt-get.
Since this I don’t See any Bindings or other things in the Papier ui in the extensions Part.
I use the openhab-offline package
Really great. I have updated openhab2-offline on my Raspberry Pi 3 from 2.0.0~20161225164049 to 2.0.0~20161203033012 and it worked without any problems.
The only issue I had that I must reinstall the bindings for KNX and Fritzbox TR064.
Thanks for this christmas release. Now I’m waiting for the Release 2.0 with anticipation
After apt-get to the offline package beta5 I’m not able to install anything with the Paper-UI. The operation times out.
In the openhab.log is a [WARN ] message stating [url.mvn.internal.AetherBasedResolver] - Error resolving artifactorg.apache.karaf.bundle:org.apache.karaf.bundle.core:jar:4.0.4:Could not find artifact org.apache.karaf.bundle:org.apache.karaf.bundle.core:jar:4.0.4
Also, all vesions shown in the Paper-UI are shown as 2.00b4
