v14.2 Release Update #5 - final updated appliances and wrapup

About 3 weeks since my last announcement, I am super excited to announce the final few v14.2 appliances! And the completion (almost) of the v14.2 release! Yay!

So this will be the last v14.2 release announcement, as now the whole library has been updated. We do have a couple more new appliances that are almost ready. But we're holding them back for the next release; v15.0. Otherwise the v14.2 release might never be finished! :)

As per always, the updated appliances can be downloaded and/or launched on AWS from the Hub via their respective appliance pages. Alternatively, you can sync the library via one of our mirrors.

Final wrap-up of v14.2

v14.2 is now pretty much complete. This has actually been one of our biggest releases yet. It includes a total of 100 appliances (the ones we deprecated were replaced by new ones). Once I've finished tidying up the last few things, we will have closed a massive 147 bug reports and feature requests! That's an incredible effort, great work everyone who helped out!

Credit where credit is due

Speaking of the incredible effort; I'd like to thank everyone involved. I'm not going to name everyone who has contributed as I'm sure I'll forget someone and would hate to offend anyone. But I would like to name a few individuals who have contributed massive amounts, well beyond the call of duty.

The founders

Firstly I'd like to thank Alon and Liraz, the founders of TurnKey. Thanks for making TurnKey! Thanks too, for bringing me onboard and training me up. Special thanks to Alon for his boundless patience and unending support while building me up to take care of the TurnKey releases (for v14.0, v14.1 and now v14.2). For making sure I don't miss anything, and gently reminding me when I did...!

The TurnKey dev team

Next I'd like to thank the tireless part-time developers we have on the team, Anton, Stefan and new recruits Ken, Zhenya and (very recently) Chris. You guys rock and are making TurnKey better than ever! Thanks for your work to date and I look forward to lots more of it! :)

The community superstars

Last but certainly not least, I'd like to thank the community contributions. Most of the "issues" that were fixed in v14.2 were reported by users. And if we didn't know about them, we couldn't have fixed them! There are also many other individuals who helped in the forums, provided pull requests and coding contributions via GitHub. We also had a number of upstream contributions, including support for troubles we came across and suggestions for how to improve our appliances.

Community honourable mentions

Beyond that, there have been a few core contributors who have gone well above and beyond, volunteering their time and energy. The two, I would particularly like to thank are Tomas Vondra (and his employer Home at Cloud) and John Carver (long term TurnKey contributor).

If it wasn't for Tomas, we wouldn't have an up to date and useful OpenStack build. Tomas also updated our ownCloud appliance as well as developing the Nextcloud appliance.

Without John, I'm not quite sure where we'd be!? John has taken a particular interest in security auditing TurnKey and suggesting hardening improvements as we go. John has also been maintaining the Ansible appliance (which he also originally developed) and has been maintaining the LXC appliance. John also developed a new OpenVAS appliance for v14.2, but unfortunately, we're holding that back for v15.0.

Jonathan Struebel has quietly been maintaining and improving our OpenLDAP appliance now for years. Thanks again for the great work Jonathan! Your assistance is invaluable!

The last community honourable mention goes to Ken Robinson. Ken has been a long term community volunteer, and has done some very heavy lifting, particularly for v14.0 and again in v14.2. However, over the last couple of months, Ken is transitioning to a paid contributor. We aren't yet in a position where we can really offer him what he's worth to us, but we're really glad that he's willing to do a bit of part time work with the TurnKey team.

And a special thanks to all the other community contributors who I didn't explicitly name, you know who you are! If you think you should have got a mention but didn't, please get in touch so I can fix it!

Final appliance updates

To get back to the release, here are the last of the appliance updates:

Notable updates

Ansible

The updated Ansible appliance includes Ansilbe version 2.3.1. It also now includes OOTB Windows support as well as a ton of other changes! More great work by community member John. Thanks John!

eZ platform

Formerly eZ publish; eZ platform has rebranded. This new version has replaced all the legacy code and now has a completely new code base built on the Symfony2 Full Stack Framework.

Kliqqi

Pligg CMS has also rebranded. It's new name is Kliqqi.

Deprecated appliances

There have also been a couple of losses for this release. ProjectPier, TomatoCart and PhreeBooks all appear to be dead projects. So unless they are revived in the meantime, the existing v14.1 release of these appliances will be the last. We'll leave the v14.1 builds there for now, but next release they will be removed. FWIW, the v14.2 release of Twiki will be deprecated in a similar way (i.e. won't be released as v15.0; but v14.2 release will be available for at least some time).

Last few remaining jobs

As noted, there are a couple more jobs I need to do before I can call the release complete. The first job will be to get the updated v14.2 appliance onto the AWS Marketplace so AWSMP users can launch the latest versions. I also need to tag all the repos with "14.2". Hopefully I'll have that finalised this week.

Test them out and let us know!

So please let us know how the new appliances are going for you. For general feedback, please post below or open a new forum thread. For support with any specific issues you come across, please also post on the forums. For bug reports and feature requests, you can post them straight to our issue tracker on GitHub.

What's next?

Well I'm so glad you asked! :) Next up, we're moving focus to the next release. It will be v15.0 and will be based on top of Debian 9 aka Debian Stretch. At this point, we have Core building, but there is still tons of work left to do before we could even publish that. Please keep an eye out for more info as we get closer to release. It'll probably be a little while before we have anything stable to share, but I hope to get some beta or at least rc (release candidate) releases out ASAP.