[ubuntu-studio-devel] Possible Tester

[Ross Gammon]

Hi Matthew,

Welcome to the team!

On 07/27/2016 03:10 AM, Matthew Bearson wrote:
> I recently reinstalled my copy of Win 10 onto my laptop and never got to
> the point of reinstalling, in anyone's opinion should I just buy a
> VMWare Workstation license, download Virtualbox, or reinstall Ubuntu Studio?

It depends!

To really/deeply test audio/video applications in Ubuntu Studio, you
really need Ubuntu Studio properly installed on your hard disk so you
are directly connected to audio hardware, and graphics drivers etc.

You can install Ubuntu Studio alongside Windows 10 if you wish. There is
plenty of advice on the internet about how to do this (it involves
shrinking Windows 10 to make space - or an extra hard-disk).

A lot of us have a machine that has a stable (older) version of Ubuntu
Studio for doing creative work, and another machine that runs the
developer version (currently Yakkety - to become 16.10) of Ubuntu Studio
for testing the latest stuff.

You can install multiple versions of Ubuntu Studio alongside each other,
but this is a bit risky if some bug in the testing version causes your
"creative" version to break or stop booting (just when you have that
creative itch).

I make heavy use of Virtual Box. You don't need a license for that. I
have 32 and 64 bit versions of all the supported Ubuntu Studio releases,
and the developer versions installed in Virtual Box. This makes it very
easy to take a snapshot, or make a clone of the virtual machine, install
test packages, test away, and then delete the clone, or restore the
snapshot if I break something.

But you can't always reproduce all bugs in a VM, sometimes the bugs only
exist in the VM, and some applications just don't work properly (or at
the correct speed) within a VM.

I hope that helps. Just sing out if you need more help.

Regards,

Ross