11.0 was a great & popular release. Thank you! 11.2 builds on that with:
- Firefox 10
- Linux 3.2 with TCP Proportional Rate Reduction
- Removal of confusing tab groups from Firefox, making things simpler
- Stop accidental downloads of unknown mimetypes, therefore saving precious bandwidth
- For developers: Build upgraded to live build a42 from Debian Live and source has moved to Github
- 10 second retry on net Error, for cases where network isn't quite ready
- More (non-free) wireless firmware: realtek, libertas, brcm80211 & atheros, means your wireless kiosk will almost certainly work :)
Please check out the 11.2 package changes, compared to the previous 11.0 release.
Making upgrading to the latest releases easier
Webconverger strives to be a simple secure kiosk solution. Saving you time and headaches. Although Webconverger is well protected (being read only for example) from many browser vulnerabilities that arise, it is still best security practice to be up to date. Not only that, your users will appreciate the better HTML5 support and speed improvements in Firefox.
We know that upgrading Webconverger is painful with these frequent releases & no automatic updating:
- Download latest ISO from http://download.webconverger.com/
- Re-imaging USB stick or burning entirely new CD
- Re-deploying to physical machines
Conservative customised users are often much less enthusiastic about the upgrade process above and can't easily justify the full cost.
Firstly Webconverger will reduce the cost of an image update to existing customers by 50%, providing there are no additional customisations and the customer is kind enough to provide a testimonial. So a photo of Webconverger (could be anonymous) in use in your institution and 50GBP if you have already had a customised image, based say on version 10, that you want today on 11.2.
The order form will be updated soon to reflect this new strategy.
Moving to a subscription based model and to a sustainable future
In the next weeks a new development project will kick off whereby we will enable some persistence (saves the updates, i.e. not read only anymore) in the USB images to enable efficient updates to the squashfs images of Webconverger. Here the business model will be a subscription based one. Further details such as the price of such a convenient service has not been finalised.
Webconverger as a business needs a regular income and I hope you can understand and support this direction. Any questions or comments? Please email feedback2012@webconverger.com.
Image credits, Ruth Chong used:
- Linux Tux
- HTML5 logo
