We hope yes. If not then not. I'm not too worried about WHEN we launch. For me it's important HOW we launch. Launching a stable network that is absoutely bullet-proof and well tested is much more important to me than launching next month or even this year.
Only few coins that have released recently have been written from scratch and they are facing serious issues. I don't know how Crypti is doing but NODE had some outages recently...again. This can't and won't happen to us because we won't release until we're absolutely ready for it.
I don't mean to say we're taking things slow - hell no. We're going as fast as possible but as slow as neccessary. People will be able to be confident in our software and network from day 1 and that is worth a lot more than launching before some imaginary deadline.
Other things - beside devlopment - also take time but as xtester said those things will be announce soon
With this in mind, i sincerely hope there will be guides for people who wish to set up nodes.
As i said in a previous message; i'd like to support the network by purchasing a few banana Pi's to help support NEM. But i would need some guidance to get it up and running as i'm somewhat unfamiliar with the OS's they use.