Drinking our own champagne

This page details information for running the development release as a day to day system.

Why Drinking our own champagne?

Using your own system to test your own system is a mark of faith in that system. It is also known as dogfooding named after the dog food reps who would actually eat the dog food to show it was of good quality. icecreaming is another term and it comes loosely under the title of smoke testing. As ubuntu produces the finest quality of operating system, why should we not drink our own champagne to show to everyone that ubuntu posses the ability to self test.

Why use a development version for daily use

Whilst we have a good range of test cases that will pick up any issues with the standard installation, there is nothing like using the development system on a daily basis as if it was your production machine. That said, please do be aware that it may break on you and keeping regular backups is essential!

One example of such testing is a bug that affected kvm with the new kernel release kvm host hangs, which was only picked up because it was installed onto a development version and caused a system freeze. We cannot write test cases for every possible application that you may install, so this is a great way to find this sort of issue.

Updating a development version

Whilst for production releases, it is normal to use:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

For development versions the command is slightly different:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

It is also important that you are aware of the system offering partial updates, this is covered at common questions for testing.

PPA usage

It is normal that you may be asked to test a new version of something. The developers often hold these in a PPA. PPA Testing has details on this. Be sure to only add a trusted ppa, this will usually come via an email / announcement from the ubuntu-quality area. If you are ever in doubt, you must check.

What can I expect as part of being such a tester?

• A opportunity to learn lots and get help with testing.
• Plenty of hugs from everyone on the quality team.
• Seriously, a good time!