We’re delighted to announce that we’re participating in another ‘Ubuntu Testing Week’ from April 1st to April 7th with other flavours in the Ubuntu family. On April 1st, the beta version of Xubuntu 21.04 ‘Hirsute Hippo’ will be released after halting all new changes to its features, user interface and documentation. Between April 1st and the final release on April 22nd, all efforts by the Xubuntu team and community should be focused on ISO testing, reporting bugs, fixing bugs, and translations.
It has been a year since we last did a collaboration with other Ubuntu flavors for an Ubuntu Testing Week, which was done for Xubuntu 20.04 LTS. That event was a major success, as a large volume of testers participated and it was announced on various linux news sites and podcasts. Alan Pope (aka Popey) from Canonical, Rick Timmis from the Kubuntu team, and Bill from the Ubuntu Mate team helped spread the word about the previous event in this clip from Big Daddy Linux Live (BDLL) on how the event came about, its goals, as well as points on how to test. You won’t want to miss being part of the event this year! Read on to learn how.
During the testing week you can download the daily ISO image and try it out, though you are welcome to start from today. You can test without changing your system by running it in a VM (Virtual Machine) with software like VMWare Player, VirtualBox (apt-install) and Gnome Boxes (apt-install), or you may run it from a USB, SD Card, or DVD, to test if your hardware works correctly. You can use software like Etcher and Gnome Disks (apt-install) to copy the ISO to a USB Drive or SD Card, while apps like Brasero (apt-install) and Xfburn (apt-install) can be used to burn it to DVD. We encourage those that are willing, to install it either in a VM or on physical hardware (it requires at least 15GB of hard disk space) and use it for a few days, as more bugs can be discovered and reported this way.
There are a variety of ways that you can help test the release, including trying out the various live session and installation test cases from the ISO tracker, which take less than 30 minutes to complete (example 1, example 2, example 3 below). If you find a bug, you’ll need a Launchpad account to file it against the package the app is bundled in, which you can find by watching this Easy Bug Reporting By Example video. If the bug is found in the installer, you can file it against ubiquity, or you can file it against the linux package, if your hardware isn’t working.
Please test apps that you regularly use, so you can identify bugs and regressions that should be reported, especially as the recently released Xfce 4.16 is bundled in this release. You can learn about what else is new in this release in the Release Notes. New ISO files are built everyday, and you should always test with the most up-to-date ISO. It is easier and faster to update an existing daily ISO file on Linux with the command below (you’ll need to run it in the terminal from within the folder with the ISO file).
$ zsync http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/daily-live/current/hirsute-desktop-amd64.iso.zsync
We look forward to you joining us to make Xubuntu 21.04 an even bigger success, and hope that you will also test out the other Ubuntu flavours. The success of the previous event was mentioned by the former Ubuntu Desktop Lead Martin Wimpress (aka Wimpy) in the Ubuntu Podcast Season 13 Episode 03 at 20:21 where he said,
"… It is definitely paying dividends. In the nicest way possible, they made members of the Desktop Team cry today. We had our weekly team meeting where we go through all the bug reports to triage them and usually there are some, and there were pages of them and we didn’t get through them all. So we are scheduling another bug triage meeting later this week in order to pick up where we left off from. But this is great because we are actually getting decent bug reports that we can work with and [take] action [on] and improve what will be the final release in 3 weeks time. So for all the tears that were shed, it was definitely a worthwhile endeavor because these are bugs that other people would encounter when they install 20.04 for the first time. So thank you everyone that was involved in that effort. It was much appreciated."
You are welcome to chat with us live in our dedicated telegram groups ( Ubuntu Testers, Xubuntu Development ) or IRC channel ( #ubuntu-quality on freenode ). In order to assist you in your testing efforts, we encourage you to also read our Quality Assurance (QA) guide and new testers wiki. We look forward to your contributions, your live chatting, and hopefully your participation in future testing sessions. Follow the #UbuntuTestingWeek hashtag on twitter and facebook for the latest news. Happy bug hunting and don’t forget to spread the word!