[ubuntu-uk] ISO Testing - Getting Started

[Alan Pope]

Hi All.

(Note I have sent this to Ubuntu UK LoCo mailing list and bcc'ed all
the people who volunteered to help, apologies if you get this twice,
this was intentional, but won't happen again)

I mentioned a while ago that it might be nice to kick off a UK LoCo
Team for doing some essential testing of Ubuntu ISO images. I've taken
the lead from the Italian LoCo who have been doing this for the last 6
months or so very successfully. I figured it was a great way to get
people contributing to the project without much in the way of deep
technical skills.

I've taken the Italian LoCo wiki pages and (with the help of Google
chrome) translated them into English and put them here:-

NOTE: There may be translation errors, omissions or mistakes or it
might read clunkily, please help me get these pages spot on!

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/TestingTeam - Main introduction page.
Read this first.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/TestingTeam#Participate - Specifically
this bit if you're interested in helping out with this activity.

The idea being that people go through the 'Participate' section and
get themselves familiar with the process, and fulfil all the
pre-requisites therein. Most are easy and you may already have done
such as 'Register on launchpad', others you might not have done.
There's some reading material in there too.

I've created a team on lauchpad:-

http://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-uk-testing

However, it's a moderated team and the policy for joining is that
you've performed the steps outlined in the 'Participate' steps above.
This enables us to ensure a level of quality control within the team.
Join once you've gone through the participate steps. Note that the
final step on the Participate is to actually download an ISO image and
perform a QA test. So this ensures that anyone who joins the team has
fulfilled all the necessary requirements. It might look onerous but it
really isn't.

Please join the team once you're ready.

There is an IRC channel for testing which is #ubuntu-testing - NOTE:
not the UK loco channel, but the testing team IRC channel. I checked
with the testing team at UDS and they'd rather we had committed
testers hang out in their channel (as well as ours) and testing
related conversations happen there. So you're welcome to hang out in
there, or join as and when you're doing testing.

One thing we might want to consider in the future is sharing mobile
phone numbers (for the willing) as the testing team sometimes need
test performed in double-quick time. If they can get hold of people
quickly they can expedite those tests. For now though, for non-urgent
stuff we can use IRC and this mailing list.

Maverick (10.10) Alpha 1 ISOs are (just about) ready and waiting to be tested!

I'm just as new to this as many of you, so we're going on a bit of an
adventure together. Questions / comments / suggestions very welcome!

Cheers,
Al.