openSUSE 13.2: time to get your hands dirty

With less than three weeks from the release of our beloved green distro and the first release candidate already rocking, we can feel like we are almost there. This is exactly the right time to remember that there is still a lot of work to do and fun to have. Open source is awesome, but only as awesome as the people working on it. Nothing will happen unless YOU make it happen, so it’s time to get your hands dirty!

Testing

Every openSUSE release is tested using openQA, which saves developers from trivial and repetitive work. But in order to reach the quality level we all love from openSUSE stable releases much more testing is needed. We would like to test every single combination of hardware -from netbooks to supercomputers- and options -from default values to the most geeky weird configurations-. So please take a look to the online spreadsheet that has been created to organize the manual testing, read the instructions about coordinating the effort and hunt all those nasty bugs!

Celebrating awesomeness

We want to let the world know how awesome openSUSE 13.2 is. That means writing a public announcement, a features guide, a press kit, social messages… What do all those initiatives have in common? They are all based on the major features page at the openSUSE wiki. So please visit the wiki and add your favorite 13.2 feature to that page. What have you being working on since 13.1? What feature blew your mind when you saw it in action? Why were you waiting for that particular version of your favorite tool? If it’s not in the major features page, it didn’t happen.

Taking pictures

A picture is worth a thousand words. Release Candidate 1 already includes the final artwork for openSUSE 13.2, so it’s time to renew the screenshots in the corresponding openSUSE wiki page and to add new ones. You don’t even need to take the screenshots yourself, openQA is full of pictures you can grab. Say cheese!

Highlighting the strengths

The already mentioned announcement and features guide are both great to have a clear overview of what is coming with the new release. But those teams that have hit a major milestone in openSUSE 13.2 maybe want to ensure that the achievement is not lost in the stream of shiny new things. Before (and even after) every release we use to publish several sneak peaks focused on concrete highlights. Just think about a worthy topic you are familiar with (btrfs and snapper, desktop environments, xfs…) and the openSUSE Marketing Team will be glad to help you turning it into a nice article.

Documenting

Is always nice to have somebody to ask when you find a problem, but is even nicer if you have all the pitfalls and important changes documented in advance. That’s what our release notes are for. As explained by Karl in the Factory mailing list, the release notes are ready for getting your contributions.

Getting ready to spread the word

If a release hits the Internet and no one tweets about it, does it make a sound? We don’t want to know the answer, so the openSUSE social machinery should be in perfect shape for the release date. If you manage some of the openSUSE related accounts in social media, please be sure to keep the corresponding wiki page updated so we can all coordinate.

Go for it

Enough said, there are tasks for everybody so let’s start working!