Notes from the Mousepad

Ara Pulido sent this message out to the Xubuntu-Users mailing list the other day, and I thought it was worth passing along to the greater Ubuntu community.  Testing for the Xubuntu 9.10 release candidate is going on now, so please read the email below and help out if you can.  Thanks!

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I have been coordinating the ISO testing for Xubuntu since February of this year, and while it has really helped me to learn more about the release cycle, I am going to be changing jobs soon, and will not have as much free time. I’m also trying to contribute more to Xubuntu documentation, and that takes up my time, too. With those things in mind, I’m looking for someone who would be available to coordinate pre-release ISO testing for Xubuntu.

The good news is that this is technically a very easy task. It just requires an interest in testing and some time immediately prior to a release. Things can get hectic on the days leading up to milestone release day, but it is otherwise not too difficult.

A couple points:
- I will still test, but I just won’t be able to coordinate testing
- It’s not happening immediately. My new job starts on September 24th.
- I’ll help transition things to whoever wants to take this over. You won’t have to learn things from scratch.

Who would be good for this role? Here’s a few qualities and attributes that would be helpful for someone interested in being the ISO test coordinator:
- An interest in testing pre-release versions of Xubuntu
- A basic knowledge of the overall Xubuntu release cycle
- A computer with a cd burner and a decent (i.e., not dial-up) internet connection
- A spare computer, hard drive, or disk partition on which they would be willing to perform a test installation of Xubuntu
- Preferred: I think it’s easier for a test coordinator to coordinate things if they live in Europe (UTC-200 to UTC+500). This isn’t a requirement, but a person in Europe would be at home in the evening when test coordination activity is ramping up, and it’s much easier to coordinate activity from home than from the grocery store or your job.
- Optional: Test coordination could even be shared amongst a few people.

If you’re interested in heading ths up, please let me know. If you aren’t interested in leading things yourself, please mention this to your appropriate local community teams in case someone else may be interested.

I volunteered at Free Geek Chicago again on Sunday, and spent much of my day trying to get Xubuntu Feisty Fawn to install on some rather unique hardware. It didn’t go so well.

The machine in question was a PII with 256mb of RAM, and two SCSI hard drives – one 8gb and one 4gb in size. I tried to set up an LVM installation, but the installer hung after it had completed 85% of the software installation. So I also tried manual partitioning, setting up the root partition on the 4gb drive, and boot, home, and swap partitions on the 8gb drive. It hung at 85%, too. Even trying to do a command-line installation hung at 85%.

With frustration mounting, we just switched over to a new computer. I knew there had to be a way to view what was causing the install to hang, so I asked the folks in #ubuntu-iso what I could do to see these error messages. I talked the issue over with Stephane Graber, and he suggested that I check out some of the install messages in /var/log by pressing ctrl-alt-f2 and getting to run level 2 once the installation had hung.

I’m going to do that the next time I’m at Free Geek Chicago. If anything, I’d like to at least get a good bug report out of this. I haven’t done too much testing of SCSI drives, and also haven’t done to much LVM testing, so I think I might try and add that to my testing repertoire on this release cycle. I’m even going to trade in my standard PII testing box (which runs just fine, thank you) for this SCSI beast (assuming it has no hardware issues).

I’ve been so busy lately, haven’t had much time for all things linux-related. I guess I’m taking a breather since all of the 7.04 *ubuntus are out now. From what I can tell, the release has been a good one – no big “gotchas” have come up since release. Even though I do hear about the occasional problem with installing or upgrading, we haven’t seen anything as bad as all of the issues relating to the dapper-to-edgy upgrades.

I’m working with the rest of the ISO testing team to bring Xubuntu more into the testing fold for the Gutsy Gibbon release. During the Feisty release, I had to kind of follow the lead of the two Ubuntu ISO testing leads, so Xubuntu was always a little behind the procedures of the other groups. It was mostly because Xubuntu didn’t have much of a testing team at the start, so now that they see we have a team, hopefully they’ll let us be better integrated.

The Xubuntu team has an IRC meeting set up for tomorrow afternoon to discuss the plans for Gutsy Gibbon. From feedback we received during the Ubuntu Open Week sessions, and our own wants and needs, we’d like to have a wifi connection manager similar to the gnome-network-manager (but without the gnome deps), better samba support (we’ll see what approach we can take for that), and maybe some games. We also need to get our multimedia options in order . . . I know that for me, Gxine just doesn’t cut it.

All in all, it’s tough to add features while keeping the lightweight mandate of Xfce. Features vs. bloat . . . fighting the good fight. We’ll see how things turn out.

There’s been a lot of changes going on with x/k/ed/ubuntu ISO testing lately, and a lot of the action is being coordinated in the forums. Check it out if you’re interested.

There’s also a relatively new irc channel for ISO testing discussions, #ubuntu-iso on irc.freenode.net. If you see someone in there with the nick “j1mc,” be cool to him. He’s nice.

Ubuntu Illinois / Chicago member Freddy Martinez had given me some brief pointers on filing bugs during one of our more recent Ubuntu-Chicago loco meetings, but my involvement with the ISO testing has really started to give me a taste for what bug reporting and triaging involves. Now that Xubuntu ISO testing is at a decent state, and we have enough testers to keep things moving, it seems like bug-related work will make for a natural progression from what I’m currently doing.

The “Helping With Bugs” wiki page looks like a good-enough place to get started.

I’m starting to better understand the role of ISO testing, and how it differs from bug reporting. ISO testing looks at successes and failures from a big picture – is this release stable enough to get out the door? ISO testing seeks out the show-stopper bugs that would prevent a milestone build from being released. Bug reporting works in a similar way, but on a smaller scale – does this package work as intended?

That’s how I kind of see it, anyway. They are different, but they compliment each other.

Oh, and apparently QA is a whole other ballgame, but I don’t know much about how it differs yet.

I’ve modified the Xubuntu Testing wiki pages to provide better instructions on testing Xubuntu, and hopefully we’ll get a good group of testers fired up. Unfortunately, there weren’t enough tests done on Xubuntu Herds 1, 3, or 4, so no Herd was officially released.

You can take a look at the testing pages here. I know that quite a few of the Chicago Local Community Team members are Kubuntu developers and users, but it never hurt anyone to help out a different member of the *ubuntu family, so I hope some of you will give it a try.

I’m optimistic that we’ll get a good number of testers, though, and hopefully you’ll be seeing a Herd 5 release of Xubuntu Feisty by the end of the week.

<j1mc> somerville32, i had a great install experience with the nightlies leading up to herd4.
<somerville32> j1mc: Did you report that?
<j1mc> no
<somerville32> hehe
<somerville32> See, we need that
<somerville32> We need to get an official testing team together maybe
<j1mc> i’m mostly on xubuntu-user mailing list.
<somerville32> j1mc: Would you like to head up an Xubuntu testing team?
<j1mc> what would it entail? are there other examples of testing teams?
<somerville32> IT seems like you already do quite a bit of testing
<somerville32> So you’d just need to recruit a few more people to help you out and schedule regular testing
<somerville32> Especially just before a pre-release
<somerville32> So that we can release an image as the pre-release
<j1mc> sure. i think i can do that.
<somerville32> What platforms can you test on?
<j1mc> just i386 right now.
<somerville32> Ok
<j1mc> i could get another machine pretty easily. i volunteer for free geek chicago
* somerville32 nods.
<j1mc> we use xubuntu there, so they’d be willing to donate a machine.
* somerville32 nods.
<somerville32> So you’d just need to find a few dedicated individuals who could help test the other official platforms too
<somerville32> Awesome!
<j1mc> and then get them to report their results.
<j1mc> hehe
* somerville32 hands j1mc the “Xubuntu ISO QA Manager” hat.
* j1mc accepts hat