Hello Xubuntu users!

As you may know, Thursday 22nd October we are releasing Xubuntu 9.10 Release Candidate. This is a very important milestone, as it will be very similar to final Xubuntu 9.10 (between them, only very critical fixes will be accepted).

For the 9.10 release we are having very little coverage of Xubuntu images and we would need a harder effort for the RC milestone.

To help, you will need an account in the ISO tracker [1]. This blog post is useful as starting guide:

http://tinyurl.com/yjujh6c

Also, one of the common complains about ISO testing is that, when the call for testing is done, it takes too long to download the ISOs for that candidate image.

Preparing today for that moment couldn’t be easier:

dl-ubuntu-test-iso is a script, available as part of the ubuntu-qa-tools, that downloads Ubuntu (+ Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc) ISO images for testing purposes. The script uses rsync, which means that the second time you run it, it only downloads the changes to each ISO. So, if you use it today, and keep running it every day (or every couple of days), you will be already set up to help when the candidates images for RC start appearing.

You will need a configuration file to tell the script which images your interested in. I have prepared a configuration file for Xubuntu, and it is attached. You will only need to edit it to select which architecture you’re interested in. Save it in you home folder as .dl-ubuntu-test-iso

Once you have save the configuration file:

* If you’re running Karmic, you can install the ubuntu-qa-tools package directly.

$ sudo apt-get install ubuntu-qa-tools
$ dl-ubuntu-test-iso

* If you’re not running Karmic, get the ubuntu-qa-tools from its bazaar repository:

$ bzr branch lp:ubuntu-qa-tools
$ ./ubuntu-qa-tools/dl-ubuntu-

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.

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’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 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.

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.

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.