Webconverger 17.0 is exciting for two reasons:

  1. New installer, allowing you the choice to install to a USB stick
  2. Whole base is upgraded. squeeze/artax → wheezy/baureo

Installing to a USB stick, a "Keyosk"

Webconverger 17.0 Install options

The "install" term can be mis-interpreted as a straightforward copy. Install in Webconverger parlance means you are creating a read/write store.

When you follow the USB guide you are:

  1. Downloading the ISO
  2. "dd-ing", that is plonking the image upon the USB stick, without partitioning the USB stick (this is tricky)

The new installer allows you to partition (tricky bit solved) the USB stick and use it as a read/write store. This is powerful because now a Webconverger installed USB stick can download updates to itself, as long as there is space on the disk. You don't need to install to a hard drive to enjoy the zero maintenance joys of an always uptodate installation.

So the steps are now for an USB installed Webconverger (using two USB memory sticks A&B):

  1. Downloading the ISO
  2. Plonking the image upon the USB stick A - see the USB guide
  3. Boot stick A, and choose "Install Webconverger"
  4. Insert stick B (2G+ recommended)
  5. Choose to install to stick B
  6. Now boot from installed stick B, which is now able to update itself!

Major base upgrade

For those who are already using the installed version of Webconverger upon their hard drive, you have just leaped ~2 years into the future. Absolutely seamlessly thanks to a our innovative home grown gitfs upgrade technology.

You can see the extent of the upgrade from 16.0 upon 17.0 package changes. Introducing a 3.7.x Linux kernel, a raft of video driver updates and new technologies such as systemd.

What does this mean? This means newer hardware will be far better supported. Previous issues with the NUC's video rotation and sound are now fixed and it works great. Many of you will notice WebGL working in Webconverger across many different types of hardware.

To see a detailed list of changes run git log --oneline --decorate 16.0..17.0 upon the curated chroot.

Download from Webconverger.com. The webc-17.0.iso md5 is 677f7f5ba00a45f3b641fabf1e6ffa93 and the sha1sum is 67e1adfa7010e46c1ff3220636d751a1d9ad6190.

Update: Install users will efficiently upgrade to Firefox 18.0.2 with this JS stability bug fix, which didn't make the cut of the 17.0 release.