Welcome to the Pre-Release/Beta Forum

[oldcpu]

WELCOME to all ye Beta Software Testers!

This forum area is reserved for you dedicated users, who walk "on the edge", and who like to live up there with the moon walkers and with the Mount Everest mountain climbers, ... not to mention the extreme skiers with whom you chum around with. This is for you - the Beta Software Testers who like to live dangerously.

But having typed that, we, the conservative majority, desperately need you!! You are the advance guard, that pave the way for us mere conservative mortals who get frustrated when a stable version of openSUSE hiccups because of our own ineptitude. You brave souls have to rise beyond your own hiccups, and put up with all sorts of teething pains of new software releases, helping the open source developers in their efforts to put up a new package, or indeed a new openSUSE release.

To you, I take off my hat and say "THANK YOU". And this sub forum is dedicated to your fine efforts. Please post here, and converse, and share your pain, your glory, and help each other, in the fine work you do.

For openSUSE Newbies:

You are new to openSUSE and wonder "what in the world is this forum all about?".

Well it goes like this:

There exists an openSUSE site called "Factory" which is where the "Developers" (aka Devs) from all over the world put together the next release of openSUSE. There will be certain milestones during an 11-month cycle that will progress from "Alpha" to "Beta" to "Release Candidate" (RC) to "GoldMaster" (GM) to "Public Release. A "Roadmap" can be found @ Roadmap - openSUSE. Bring that link up in a new tab in Firefox and we will talk about it.

Alpha0 <-- Really rough; may even be command line (CLI)
Note from the roadmap that openSUSE had 4 iterations of Alpha before moving to Beta.

Beta0 <-- A number of bug fixes will have been applied; there will still be bugs however; but, it should be good enough to use (but not for a production system).
Note from the roadmap that openSUSE had 3 iterations of Beta before moving to Release Candidate. Along about Beta is where we hope our membership jumps in and starts getting the bug reports filed. Your participation at this phase will make for a much better final product. This is also an excellent way to learn; the Devs will probably ask for more information -- usually with a link to a guide to help you along.

Release Candidate <-- It's almost ready for release! There may still yet be some known bugs the Devs are working on; not all the review has yet taken place and for sure there are bugs yet to be found. Your help with RC1 is most welcome by the entire community. Note from the roadmap that there is not a great span of time until the release of "Goldmaster". So, do the community a favor, install rc1 and get the bugs reported.

GoldMaster <-- Hopefully 11-months of labor from "Susers" all around the world has paid off and with your bug reports from Beta and Release Candidate a near final product is made available. There are still some reviews to be done and the Novell/SuSE engineers make it into a final, polished product.

I'll leave you with a few important links:

CALL FOR TESTERS !!

• A call for testers. We need YOUR help ! Testing Team - openSUSE

Stay Informed

• OpenSUSE mailinglist Archives @ openSUSE Mailinglist Archives
• Join a Mailing List @ Communicate - openSUSE
• Chat on IRC @ Communicate - openSUSE
• Read PlanetSUSE.org @ Planet SUSE

Bug Reports

• Find Specific Bug Reports @ https://bugzilla.novell.com/query.cgi
• Submit Bug Reports @ Submitting Bug Reports - openSUSE
• Excellent guidance on bug reporting: Submitting Bug Reports - openSUSE
• For KDE bug reports please follow guidance here: Bugs:KDE - openSUSE

For those looking for the latest cutting edge openSUSE, go here:

• Software.openSUSE.org

For more information on how openSUSE goes about Development version, please go here:

• Development Version - openSUSE

So, welcome to the Pre-Release/Beta Forum. Post the results of your Beta or Release Candidate install (problems, issues and successes) and we will chat about them -- heck, we might even solve an issue now and then.

Have fun

Oldcpu Note: This stickie was a combined effort of oldcpu and snakedriver, where the solid factual helpful information was provided by snakedriver, and the senseless babble by oldcpu.
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