On Saturday the 8th I hosted an Ubuntu Global Jam focused on ISO testing over at the Wikimedia Foundation office in downtown San Francisco.
Upon arrival I met Andrew White, our Wikimedia host, and he outlined a few options for setup. Given power requirements we ended up in a conference room and I was able to set up all the materials:
As I mentioned in a previous post, I brought printouts of the following:
- Printable version of ReportingBugs
- Printable version of FindRightPackage
- Bug reporting instructions for Ubuntu Desktop amd64
- Basic Ubuntu Live test: ubuntu-basic-live.odt
- Basic Ubuntu Install test: ubuntu-basic-install.odt
- Xubuntu Short test: xubuntu-short.odt
- Xubuntu Long test: xubuntu-long.odt
People began arriving right at noon, such prompt geeks we are!
Around 12:20 we had all the early attendees and I started with playing a youtube videos created by Nicholas Skaggs. I quickly realized my error here. While these videos are great for people sitting at their computer just learning how to test, they weren’t so great for an interactive audience shut indoors on a sunny San Francisco afternoon. I ended up skipping through the video a bit to show key sections, but ended up doing live demos of everything I wanted to demonstrate.
I gave a quick tour of the ISO tracker, a crash course in bug reporting (use ubuntu-bug!) and introduced the Package tracker for folks who wanted to do application testing on LiveCDs, there was even a Ubuntu Global Jam (Quantal) set up on that tracker for use during the event (thanks again, Nick).
Pizza arrived shortly after 1:30. Huge thanks to Geoffrey Thomas, he was able to get his employer Moka 5 to sponsor the pizza (note: they are based out of Redwood City and hiring software engineers who are familiar with Ubuntu development).
It’s funny, when I would tell people who are unfamiliar with the Ubuntu Community what this event was about, I had a really hard time making it sound fun – but I assure you it was! No boring, dry software testing here. We had lots of fun with strange and amusing errors and failures, fascinating bugs that seemed software based but which couldn’t be replicated on different hardware and in general a lot of joking about the perils of running development software (our daily builds hit this bug which crashed the installer before you began, fortunately LiveCD+install worked!). TestDrive ended up being a big hit, and I’m really glad I brought along live USB sticks, USB sticks with just the ISO files (awesome for seeding TestDrive!) and burned DVD-Rs, as all were heavily used.
In all we had about a dozen people come out for the jam, one came up all the way from Santa Cruz, which is about 90 minutes away.
Huge thanks to everyone who came out and again to our sponsors, the Wikimedia Foundation (who even offered to host again) and Moka 5. It was a great event.