Hi everybody,

we (the Xubuntu Team) have exciting news for the whole community; the Alpha-2
release candidate images are fresh out of the oven. Now they need a lot of
testing. The final milestone images are supposed to be released on Thursday,
28th of June. Here’s an overview of how you can help us in the quality assurance
process.

The images themselves can be downloaded from the CD image archive [0]. You don’t
have to go there separately, though, as links to above can be found on the site
where you post the results of the tests. That site is called the QA tracker [1].

Once you go there, you’re first expected to log in. If you have an existing
Ubuntu / LaunchPad SSO login, you can use that. If you don’t yet have one, the
dialog also provides a way to do it as well.

After a successful logging in, you can choose the product you’d like to test.
Xubuntu has four (4) options; alternate install images and desktop images, for
two archs (i386 and amd64). There’s also the upgrade products for both archs,
too, so if you have an existing precise (12.04) installation that you can use,
it’d be great if you could test that as well.

Choosing a product takes you to the test cases. Unfortunately these pages are
still under construction, so you will have to use links from this email for the
additional test cases we’d like you to follow while testing.

If you haven’t yet downloaded the image, do it now by clicking the link to the
download information. Now you will see the various ways of acquiring the image.
Once you’ve done that, return back to the previous page and select the method of
installation you’d like to test.

At this point you are ready to start testing, so first you have to prepare the
boot media. Depending on the install image of your choice, you can either burn
it to a CD [2] or create a startup USB stick [3]. The latter only works for
desktop images, unfortunately.

The link ‘Detailed information on the testcase’ guides you through the
installation process. That is the first step of the ISO testing. If you have any
trouble during this step, the installation fails, and testing stops. This is
obviously a critical bug, preventing you from proceeding further. At this point
you should refer to the guide to reporting bugs [4], do the steps described
there, and mark the test as failed with relevant bug numbers in the ‘Critical
bugs’ box. If, however, you could proceed to the end of the installation, but
noticed some unexpected issues while running the process, you can do the same as
above but mark the bug numbers in the plain ‘Bugs’ box. Otherwise, you can
proceed with the Xubuntu-specific testcases.

Please note, that if you chose to do the Live Session testcase, we have our own
version of that testcase at [5]. It describes what to look for in the live
session, and what to check after installation. You only need to run the first
part of that page for this particular case.

For all the others, we have two testcases that we’d like you to cover. The
aforementioned Short testcase [5], and for milestone releases especially (but of
course greatly appreciated for daily testing, too) we have the brand new Long
testcase [6] (which may still change slightly as we get more feedback regarding
it). Of these I’d like to stress that the latter part of Short has the
post-installation cases, and once you’re done with them, you are free to move to
the Long testcase. Short is always a prerequisite for the Long testcase.

On all the cases, the same holds true; if any step fails, the whole test is
marked as failed, and you’re asked to follow the same steps as already mentioned
[4]. Only if you can successfully run all tests, is the test marked as Passed.
Otherwise it is Failed, and relevant bugs are to be filed.

For bonus points, it’d be great if you could provide us a link to your hardware
profile. There’s a nice new guide [7] for doing that. After you’ve created the
profile, you can just paste the link to it in the box under ‘Hardware profile’
title. Also, if you have any comments about the test, you’re free to express
them in the corresponding text box underneath that.

That’s it for now, and I can assure you that at the first glance it looks like a
huge ordeal, but once you get to work, you’ll notice that it doesn’t actually
take too much effort. Especially if you have the patience to do a second one,
you’ll notice it’ll get easier as you start to form a pattern that you follow.
Run more tests and soon you’ll be an automated testing machine.

The team thanks you immensily for all of your contributions, and welcomes your
feelings, opinions and questions in all the usual forums ([8] and [9]). Hope to
see you there!

[0]: http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/daily-live/current/ for the desktop CD
and http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/daily/current/ for the alternate install
CD
[1]: http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/
[2]: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BurningIsoHowto
[3]: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick
[4]: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs
[5]: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Xubuntu/Testing/Short
[6]: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Xubuntu/Testing/Long
[7]: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Xubuntu/Testing/HardwareProfile
[8]: IRC channels: #xubuntu and #xubuntu-devel on irc.freenode.net
[9]: Mailing lists: xubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com and
xubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com

Best regards,