This is the official release of BigBlueButton 2.6, the culmination of ~8 months of development, 2842 commits, 4 alpha, 7 beta, and 9 release candidates.
This is a major release of BigBlueButton and contains multiple new and improved features
- a fully reimplemented whiteboard built on top of tldraw. See Overview Video of new whitebord,
- downloading presentations with annotations,
- exporting of shared notes to the whiteboard,
- exporting content (shared notes and presentation with annotation) from the breakout rooms to the main room,
- easier setup for polling,
- recording in video format,
- easier management of breakout room users,
- support for uploading a presentation straight from Nextcloud,
- live automatic closed captions,
- improved layout management,
- improvements to webcam sharing - backgrounds, brightness, pinning,
- supporting dark theme, and
- an improved echo test!
You will also notice improved stability and usability as well as some polishing of the user interface! This release runs on Ubuntu 20.04.
Link to the installation command / instructions/ full list of features: https://docs.bigbluebutton.org/2.6/new-features/
Thanks to our Community
The BigBlueButton project thanks ZKI, the German association of Higher Education IT centers, for its members that have collectively supported the project and improvements in this release. These improvements included scalability and stress testing of the client, selecting different webcam backgrounds, pinning multiple webcams (for accessibility), and testing of the new whiteboard and recording formats. For more details on support from ZKI, see Förderung der BigBlueButton-Community – Bericht 2023.
The BigBlueButton project wishes to thank the French Ministry of Education who has directly supported the development of features in this release, including integration with Nextcloud, new whiteboard, returning content back from breakout rooms, download of slides with whiteboard marks, and recordings as video files. (In French) Le projet BigBlueButton souhaite remercier le ministère français de l'Éducation Nationale, qui a directement contribué au développement de cette version en finançant de nouvelles fonctionnalités, telles que l'intégration de nextcloud, le nouveau tableau blanc, la récupération des travaux depuis les ateliers, le téléchargement de la présentation annotée, et l'enregistrement des sessions en fichier vidéo.
We thank the many translators who helped ensure that BigBlueButton is localized.
Big THANK YOU to all community members who helped for this release -
both through sending pull requests and through reporting bugs or requesting enhancements! 🎊
Full list of changes since BBB 2.5
v2.5.x-release...v2.6.x-release
Release name
Passing -v focal-260 to bbb-install-2.6.sh will always install the latest released BigBlueButton 2.6 version.
If for some reason you would like to install this specific release, pass -v focal-260-2.6.0.
We still recommend using -v focal-260 as this repository is continually updated with each BigBlueButton 2.6 release.