Beta means Pizza. Join the Party or Make your Own!

So, we’re delaying our release. And Coolo has announced we will do another Beta. There will be plenty of time after the beta and before the release which means: we can test the heck out of it! That calls for… a BetaPizzaParty!

You might know the drill by now - we’ve done this before. You get the pizza, we make sure there’s a nice, fresh Beta ready for you to test.

Read on for some insights on Pizza and Beta!

First, get the Beta…

The latest openSUSE testing release can always be found on the openSUSE download page.

This release is the final release before openSUSE goes into Release Candidate mode so we’re looking for lots of feedback. Please install it in a VM or on one or more devices and report and help fix any problems you encounter!

Then, the Pizza…

Second, you get the Pizza (and a place to eat this). Our fellow geeko Bernhard Wiedemann has again decided to organize a Beta Pizza Party in Nürnberg somewhere around the end of this month in the SUSE offices and there will be one in Prague and possibly other SUSE offices. But if there’s no party around, you can organize your own. Be sure to check the wiki page! At least I’m organizing one in Berlin and I’d love to see more! History tells us it would be extremely surprising if there would be nothing organized in Greece - anyone up for organizing one in Brazil? Taiwan? India?

Party and more details

Don’t forget the party part of a BetaPizzaParty! Make sure you’ll have some fun at some point. One way of doing that is of course to not just order pizzas but make your own following this Geeko Recipe.

Organizing your own BetaPizza Release Party

If there’s no party in your vicinity, you can organize your own! This is not a big thing at all - it can be in a local pizza place, at your home or in a room in your office… Just invite friends & colleagues and who knows, if you put your party on the wiki, a new friend will show up!

If you are unsure on how to do it, read this and this. In short, you don’t have to be too ambitious. A place can be a room in your university, a local cafe or your house. Then you just need power - you can order the pizza’s together. Invite a few friends and put the meeting on the wiki, tweet, blog, put it on facebook and you will have some visitors. Then all you have to do is test and eat pizza!

Testing and even helping out!

Of course the focus of the BetaPizza Party is of course on openSUSE 12.2 Beta2. This means installing it and submitting bug reports when you bump into trouble. You can download the openSUSE 12.2 Beta (available soon) from the openSUSE website. It might make sense to download it and put it on an USB stick or a DVD so people can get to work right away!

Bugs should be reported and can be tracked via Bugzilla. Find a how-to on reporting bugs on the wiki. Discussions about openSUSE development takes place on the factory mailing list. openSUSE Factory is the development release of openSUSE. If you want to help out, please see the wiki page on contributing to Factory. Contributing is easy and very welcome! We happen to have this awesome tool called the Open Build Service. Think of it as a Github for packagers: Branch, Update and create a submit Request for a Package. In openSUSE terms you’ve just BURPed and we’ll be proud of you ;-)

OBS has a commandline but also a easy browser interface - you can even fix and build packages from a mobile phone or a Windows desktop!

There is plenty of help available on the Development page on the openSUSE wiki and you are more than welcome to ask for help on the openSUSE factory mailing list or on the openSUSE IRC channels!

Have a lot of fun

Whatever bugs you find, remember: even a Beta testing Pizza Party is about having fun! It doesn’t matter what technical knowledge you or the other visitors have - as long as you are having fun. And don’t eat too much pizza, overeating tends to be unhealty.

Enjoy!