Transcript
Hello, and welcome to The Linux Lemming.
I’m your host, Rostek Halibara.
This is Episode 4, and I’ve decided to title this one Helping the Hippo.
So this is Ubuntu 20.04 testing week, which has been crossing the feeds and all the Linux
podcasts out there and news areas and different things like that, so I figured this would
be a great opportunity to put the documentation to the test and also to help out a project.
So this is a great opportunity, and I’ve never participated in an event like this before,
so I’m really grateful that something like this exists.
Alan Pope recently made a forum post about the event that also includes documentation
for new testers and several different videos that you can watch to actually see him conduct
a test in real time.
It’s about an hour investment or so to read through the documentation and watch a video
in its entirety.
The video that I watched was about 25 to 30 minutes long, and I did skip through a little
bit of it, but it is helpful to have that written documentation and a visual representation
as well.
So after reading through and watching the videos, you have to log in to an Ubuntu account, which
I’ve had since 2008 or something like that, so I was able to log in to my account and
I got started.
When you do get started with the testing week, you have a lot of different options, and depending
on the test, some of them want you to do bare metal installs and different things like that.
I don’t have any spare hardware at the moment, so I decided that I would try to do all of
my testing in VirtualBox.
And I really haven’t used VirtualBox all that much, but the process was pretty straightforward.
So I downloaded the ISOs that I wanted to test.
I chose to do Kabuntu because that’s what I run on a daily basis, and also Kylan.
I’ve never really used Kylan at all before, but looking at both of those flavors, I noticed
they still had tests that needed to be done in the live environment.
So I figured that would be a good thing to do.
So after installing VirtualBox, you have to click on to create a new virtual environment.
And when you go to set that up, you want to make sure that you change your settings to
Linux and an Ubuntu flavor.
So I’m doing 64-bit.
I don’t even know if these ones support 32, but there you have it.
I think the default when you go into VirtualBox is to use a Windows system.
So just make sure you modify that as needed.
The next step is allocating memory for that VirtualBox.
I have 32 gigabytes of memory on this laptop, so I gave it 8 gigabytes of memory.
So I didn’t want to experience any issues.
I didn’t have to provide any disk space.
So after you do the memory, it’s going to ask if you want to create a virtual hard disk.
And I figured since I’m not going to be living in this thing, I’m just testing the live environment
I don’t need a virtual hard disk at all.
And that is an option.
And after you click that, it’s going to ask you, are you sure?
You’ll only be able to run a live environment, and that’s exactly what I want to do.
So no problems there.
So after you go through that, your VirtualBox will be created, but you still have to add
the ISO and tell it to boot from that.
So you’ve got to click on the settings for the virtual environment that you just created.
Then you have to go to the controller IDE and tell it that you want it to be an optical
drive.
And then after that, you add the ISO from wherever it lives on your computer.
And in mine, it was just in my downloads folder.
After you’ve mounted that ISO, you need to click on that ISO image.
And then right below the optical drive, there’s an option to tell it that this is a live CD
or DVD.
You want to make sure you click that because if you don’t, it won’t boot properly.
So after that’s all been set up, it’s time to start up that virtual environment and
then work through the checklist that they have in their ISO tracker and submit any bugs.
So I started with Kabuntu.
And as soon as I booted that up, reading through their checklist, they said that the language
menu should be in the left column.
And when I did it, it was above where it says install or try the live environment.
So that was kind of the first discrepancy that I came across.
And that seemed to be the only one I came across in Kabuntu.
It functioned appropriately.
All the apps worked just fine.
There was no screen tearing.
It was great.
It was like I was using it on bare metal.
So I just submitted that one small little thing that I saw and maybe it’s a big deal.
Maybe it’s not, but it’s on record there now.
So after going with Kabuntu, I booted up Kylan.
And there were a lot of issues with that one.
One thing that stood out to me is when I booted up Kabuntu, there was no startup noise or
anything like that.
But there was with Kylan.
So maybe I need to go back and check sound in Kabuntu.
But Kylan had a little startup ding and everything.
But as I was moving my cursor around, it was tearing on the screen.
And every time I opened an app and clicked, these white boxes would pop up and kind of
obscure the view and everything.
So it seemed like Kylan was not as polished in a virtual environment as Kabuntu was.
So I submitted two bugs for Kylan and we’ll see where that takes it.
I’m not quite sure.
I maybe skipped over that part in the video about what happens after you submit a bug.
But I imagine it needs to be reviewed or verified by other users before they treat it as an
actual issue.
So I’ll just keep my eyes on that ISO tracker and see if anything changes or updates.
And hopefully I’ll find some more time to do some more testing in a live environment.
Looking at like Ubuntu proper and things like that, it seemed like a lot of the tests had
already been done.
But I’ll just keep looking down that list and see if there are other ways that I can
contribute.
So that’s all I have for testing week.
Just a little update on the open web analytics.
I still haven’t gotten that to play nicely with the swag container.
I found an ARM64 image for Shinet that somebody had made on their own and I think it was like
a year or two old.
So that might be part of the problem as well.
I’ve been really slow at getting back to the main developer and updating him on my process
and I feel pretty bad about that.
So I just got to find time to execute on that conversation that we were having.
But that’s all we have for the Linux Lemming this week.
I’ll see you next time.
