Hi everyone,

as previously announced, CFD.direct has decided to sponsor our macOS Client Development, and XCLOUD.me, has jumped right in and offered us a special rebate, so we can run two of their smallest instances for the price of one medium instance. This means that will be able to offer automated X2GoClient for macOS builds both for macOS 10.10 (these should work on 10.9 and 10.8 as well) as well as for macOS 10.12. The machines have been provisioned today, and Mihai will be setting them up over the course of the next few days.

Once he's done with that, we'll move on to supporting the POWER platform directly again (at present, some distributions grab our source and turn it into packages for their POWER flavor, but there's no official X2Go repository where you could get stable or nightly builds directly from us).

IBM and the Oregon State University's Open Source Lab have teamed up and are providing us with four POWER8 virtual machines (with the option to add more, should the need arise), manageable via an OpenStack WebGUI. Unlike the previous POWER8 virtual machine that we had, these new servers are going to be available for us for the foreseeable future. We intend to run at least two (one for Big-Endian, the other for Little-Endian) of those machines as Jenkins Build Slaves, just as the virtual macOS machines, so we will soon be able to provide automated builds for POWER. The other two we currently intend to run as demo servers and for testing and bugsquashing, though we might repurpose them as Jenkins Build Slaves if it turns out that we need one per Endianess *and* packaging system (DEB vs. RPM).

There's one bug that's cropped up on POWER8 LE only, and we're already curious to learn what's causing it, so we're glad we finally have access to a test environment again.

Here is a quick overview over the sponsors mentioned above:

CFD Direct <https://cfd.direct> are the primary developers of OpenFOAM <https://openfoam.org>, the free, open source software for computational fluid dynamics.

XCLOUD.me <https://xcloud.me/> is a hosting company that specializes in providing virtual macOS cloud instances - all 100% legal, as the virtual machines run on top of real Apple hardware.

IBM are the original developers of the POWER systems used in midrange computing. You can learn more about the Linux on POWER ecosystem here: <http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/software/linux/>

Oregon State University's Open Source Lab (OSU/OSL) is a nonprofit organization working for the advancement of open source technologies. They offer various means of support to open source projects, one of them being free hosting on both Intel and POWER servers. To find out more about them, please visit their web site at <http://osuosl.org/>

Kind Regards, Stefan Baur X2Go Project/Community Manager

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