Next week is RC, start downloading today!

[Ara Pulido]

Hello QA people!

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

To help in RC testing, 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 Karmic [2]. You 
will only need to edit it to select which architectures and flavours 
you're interested in. Save it in you home folder as .dl-ubuntu-test-iso

Once you have save the configuration file get the ubuntu-qa-tools from 
its bazaar repository:

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

That will save your testing images at ~/iso. And they will get updated 
every time you run the scripts (only if the images have changed).

Testing will be coordinated from Tuesday in #ubuntu-testing and you can 
start subscribing to the ISO tracker page, so you can be informed when 
the new images start to appear. Any doubts, please, contact me directly.

Thanks and happy testing!
Ara.

[1] http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com
[2] http://people.canonical.com/~ara/dl-ubuntu-test-iso.sample-cfg