This is a slightly belated announcement of the release of the XSCE School 
Server version 5.0.  The full release notes are included below.  Those who have 
been following the project will notice the order of magnitude jump in release 
numbers, e.g. 0.5 has become 5.0.  This has been done to  avoid confusion 
between the XS and XSCE projects, especially as we approach the next release.
 
XSCE has been tested on a variety of  OLPC XO laptops and on 64 bit servers and 
VMs and has been installed on RaspberryPi, Trimslice, and experimentally on the 
Cubox. To get started (assuming you have git setup) please follow the 
instructions at https://github.com/XSCE/xsce/blob/master/docs/INSTALL.rst The 
5.0 release can be cloned by  git clone https://github.com/XSCE/xsce.git 
--branch 5.0 --depth 1 or if you want the entire repository: git clone 
https://github.com/XSCE/xsce.gitgit checkout 5.0 The release notes that follow 
are at https://github.com/XSCE/xsce/blob/master/ReleaseNotes5.0.rst RELEASE 
NOTES The focus of release 5.0 is making it easier for contributors to 
participate.  This has been accomplished in three ways:1) Better 
DocumentationThe documentation concerning installation, configuration, and 
usage has been greatly expanded and clarified.  This includes information on 
alternative networking configurations and urls and ports to exercise the 
various services included.  There are also an increased number of 
troubleshooting tips.
The documentation is located at https://github.com/XSCE/xsce/tree/master/docs.
2) Relocation of Source to GithubWhile the source code for the School Server 
has always been public, moving XSCE to github encourages a workflow that is 
becoming standard in the open source software industry wherein a git repository 
is cloned and contributors work on their own branches and then create pull 
requests which allow code to be rolled up to the master copy.  Github 
facilitates this work flow and the School Server community has adopted it.
The XSCE project is located at https://github.com/XSCE/xsce.
3) Use of Ansible for InstallationThe XSCE project has been restructured around 
ansible playbooks. This has a number of benefits.  First, it allows independent 
developers to work on their individual contributions to the project (mostly) 
without tripping over other developers.  To further this aim an aggregate 
playbook 'addons' has been created as a home for installing the playbooks of 
these individuals.
Secondly, the effort to perform a testing cycle is greatly reduced.  Because 
ansible installs from a git clone it is not necessary to create a new rpm and 
install it in its entirety.  A simple git pull gets the latest version for 
testing and this version can be ones own branch or the master.  Ansible tags 
have been used widely throughout the playbooks so that it is now much easier to 
test a subset of functionality rather than having to test the entire install on 
each iteration.
Ansible is documented at http://www.ansibleworks.com/.
In addition to making it easier for a broader range of contributors, XSCE 5.0 
includes the following:
Two FlavorsThere are gateway and non-gateway ('appliance') flavors of XSCE.  
The installation attempts to determine the mode in which the server will 
operate based on attached network devices.
PlatformsXSCE has been tested on XO 1.5, 1.75, and 4 as well as on i386 and x64.
RPM Based InstallAn RPM can be produced from the ansible playbooks using 
rpmbuild -bb xsce-server.spec.  This RPM can then be installed using yum.
Not included in this ReleaseThis release does not address the recent 
announcement that Fedora Core 18 is end of life.  Experiments with Fedora Core 
20 are promising and support is expected in a future release.
TestingTo get started please install git and then issue:
git clone g...@github.com:XSCE/xsce.git
cd xsce
git checkout 5.0
Please help test this and file bugs at 
https://github.com/XSCE/xsce/issues?state=open
  
                                          
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