openSUSE celebrates Beta with BetaPizza Parties!

The openSUSE community is happy to announce that the 6th Milestone of the upcoming release will be renamed openSUSE 12.1 Beta. This change in name reflects the state of this milestone, being ready for more extensive testing. After the beta, two release candidates will become available in quick succession before the final release. To celebrate the Beta release and give it a good workout, we call out on the community to organize Beta Pizza parties around the world!

Release Schedule

As can be found in the detailed release schedule for 12.1 openSUSE has a 8 month development schedule. Starting about six weeks after the first release, six monthly milestones followed by two Release Candidates are published for testing. From the sixth milestone onwards only major/critical/blocker bug fixes are allowed and localization testing commences. Most other projects refer to this stage as ‘beta testing’ and the release team of openSUSE has decided to follow this naming from now on.

Release team coordinator Stephan “Coolo” Kulow notes: “the sixth milestone has sometimes gotten less testing than it deserved. We want to ensure the quality and stability of openSUSE and give users the best experience as possible. We need help from the wider community to find and fix the bugs in this release and this beta is the perfect opportunity to help out!”

The latest openSUSE testing release can always be found on the openSUSE download page and this timeline page provides some info on how to get involved.

BetaPizza Party

Our fellow geeko Bernhard Wiedemann has decided to organize a Beta Pizza Party in Nürnberg on the 29th of September from five to six PM. The goal of this Pizza-loaded event is to get our brand new 12.1 Beta onto as many laptops as possible and find and fix as many bugs as we can. Obviously, helping maintainers with fixing bugs by analyzing the problem, finding the cause or helping with cleaning up and removing duplicates in openFate are also pretty darn important. Now let’s see what a Beta Pizza Party is, exactly!

Aside from Nüremberg, a number of SUSE/Novell/Attachmate offices around the world will organize BetaPizza Parties and they will provide some free pizza. Find a list of locations here and note that more offices are adding themselves there so keep an eye on that page!

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!

Party

Let’s start with the Party in BetaPizza Party! Organizing one is very similar to the Launch parties and you can use the same how-to. Recently Jos Poortvliet blogged about organizing local communities and there are some interesting tips in there as well. Basically, keep it simple! You need a room - find one at your company or at the university. It’s also perfectly fine to have a BetaPizza Party in your own home! Or a local coffee shop or Pizza place with WIFI. Just invite some friends and start eating and testing. If you have power and wifi, you’re done. Pizza can be delivered anywhere, after all. Then it’s all about installing the openSUSE 12.1 Beta.

Pizza

Use your favorite pizza place to order the pizzas. If you can, try to find a sponsor. Usually a local company (maybe the one you work at) is OK with sponsoring it - just hand them the bill for the pizza! Otherwise you’ll have to ask the visitors to help out themselves…

Beta

And finally, the focus of the BetaPizza Party is of course on openSUSE 12.1 Beta. This means installing it and submitting bug reports when you bump into trouble. You can download the openSUSE 12.1 Beta (available from 22nd of September) 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!

Be sure to register your party on the BetaPizza Party wiki page so people know what’s going on. Ask friends and colleagues to join you (and invite others) and blog, tweet or post it on facebook so the world knows!

Testing

Whether you found or organized a local party or will eat the BetaPizza from home, you can participate in the testing of openSUSE 12.1! Start with downloading the openSUSE 12.1 Beta from the openSUSE website and installing it in a VM or on one of your machines. submitting bug reports when you bump into trouble. See also the Open Bugs Day page for more information.

If you want to go a bit deeper, you can help fix the issues you bump into. Grab a few fellow Geekos at your meeting and start playing with the problem. Can you identify what causes it? Can you create a better package to solve it? You can find information on participating in openSUSE, openSUSE Development, working with the Open Build Service and finally about getting your stuff in openSUSE Factory for the next RC all on the wiki.

However, if you get stuck in any way, you’re more than welcome to ask questions 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!

Enjoy!