Testing in USB

[Jeff Lane]

On 01/27/2011 10:54 AM, irlandes wrote:
> Interesting. I haven't done much testing but 10.04 because I'd almost
> rather take a beating than install a distro to suit my tastes.
>
> If USB flash testing is good, I will have to take another look at it. I
> have accumulated a significant number of flash drives, up to 16GB.  I
> probably can't do dailies, because it takes too long to download.  But,
> I can work on alphas and betas.

Well, like I said, you can always use something like Virtuabox, Xen, 
KVM, etc... use the ISOs and test in a virtual environment... it's 
valuable testing too.

As for USB, There's nothing wrong with using USB sticks to install 
instead of actually burning CD/DVDs.  Whenever I install to bare metal, 
I use USB sticks.

There is a caveat to making bootable USB sticks though... if you use the 
Startup Disk Creator I mentioned, in some cases, the end result isn't 
bootable.  So if that happens, you'll want to try unetbootin instead 
which seems to always work (I've never had issues with it at least).

Regarding dailies, I don't know what kind of internet connection you 
have, but if you have the ubuntu-qa-tools package installed, there's a 
program called dl-ubuntu-test-iso that you can use to grab whatever 
you're looking for.

What most of us who do a lot of ISO testing do is download the ISOs we 
want and then use that tool and zsync to keep them up to date... you 
don't need to download the entire ISO every time, zsync just downloads 
the diff of what you have and what's currently on cdimages.ubuntu.com 
and then creates the current ISO on your computer locally.

It makes pulling the current image a LOT faster.  In my case, I keep a 
full mirror of cdimages.ubuntu.com locally.  Using that tool and zsync, 
I can update the full mirror in about 12 hours, and that's across a 
10Mbps DSL line.  For a single image I can usually update in just a few 
minutes.

Anyway, good luck!  As has been announced, Natty Alpha 2 testing is next 
week :-)  we'd love to have your help [1]

[1] iso.qa.ubuntu.com

--
Jeff Lane - Hardware Certification Engineer and Test Tools Developer
Ubuntu Ham: W4KDH
Freenode IRC: bladernr or bladernr_
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