As we head into 2025, the interest in a Linux player is as strong as ever, and the team here at Xibo are still trying to make it happen. A combination of us hitting some snags in this development and others, and more bugs to fix in 4.0 than we hoped, has meant we’re delayed.
Those of you who watch us closely will have seen improvements to the CMS preview landing in Xibo 4.1, and that previewing is now provided by a new library called XLR (Xibo Layout Renderer) which can be found here:
This has always been “Phase 1” of the new Electron player development and i’m happy to say it has been successful. We have some further improvements to XLR landing in CMS 4.2, adding capability for interactive and conditional rendering differences between platforms.
Phase 2 is to build out all of the other logic a player needs to run, for example XMDS communication, schedule parsing, logging and alerting, etc, etc. We are 85% of the way through this work and expect to have something for our beta testers to try out shortly after we have finished deploying our next 4.2 CMS release.
Phase 3 is then fixing bugs, improving stability, building for Linux, building for Windows and packaging ahead of a public stable release.
If you’re happy to be a beta tester for the Linux player and you haven’t already joined the beta testers group, please apply now so you can be added in time to try the first release.
Thanks everyone.
Dan