Using VMWare for Dapper testing

[Evandro Fernandes Giovanini]

Em Seg, 2005-11-28 às 19:59 -0200, Carlos Ribeiro escreveu:
> Hi,
> 
> Please, this is not a troll, although some people may take it as
> such...

I don't see why, you're only trying to help. :)

> I was wondering if anyone here gave a thought about using VMWare for
> testing purposes (for Dapper, specifically). Of course, VMWare is a
> commercial piece of software, but given the availability of the free
> VMWare player, I wondered if it would be a good idea to have pre-built
> Dapper images available as VMWare player files. 

Actually, there's no problem with VMWare being commercial software. A
lot of free (libre) software is commercial software. I quote, from
fsf.org:
"``Free software'' does not mean ``non-commercial''. A free program must
be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial
distribution. Commercial development of free software is no longer
unusual; such free commercial software is very important."

The VMWare player is proprietary software, that's the problem. I see two
problems providing images: proprietary software is needed to use them,
so Ubuntu would be encouraging the use of non-free software. That goes
against the Ubuntu manifesto. The second problem:

> 1) It does not exercise the hardware, as the VM hardware is uniform.
> For some situations this is actually an advantage because it removes
> one potential source for problems;
> 

The point of testing dapper is finding and reporting problems, so they
can be fixed in time for 6.04. It's not about avoiding the problems,
quite the opposite.

For the people who want to help but can't do a full installation there's
the LiveCD. It will also help finding hardware compatibility problems
and other issues the user may have with the system. A virtual image
would be much less effective in finding these kind of bugs.

Cheers,
Evandro