As most of you have probably heard by now, our nightly VM images are ready for wider testing. I’d like to ask at least maintainers of GNOME core modules to test it.
Core modules are defined in elements/core · master · GNOME / gnome-build-meta · GitLab
I’d also like to request maintainers of core modules to review the way their modules (and their dependencies) are built, and file bugs if the apps doesn’t work correctly or would prefer it to be built with a different set of options.
To run it with you distro version of gnome-boxes (or anything that uses libvirt), first decompress it, then run: virt-install --name GNOMEOS --boot uefi --video virtio --memory 2048 --import --disk disk.img
To run it in nightly flatpak of gnome-boxes, decompress and convert to qcow2 using: qemu-img convert -O qcow2 disk.img disk.qcow2 then from gnome boxes, add a new virtual machine, select “GNOME Nightly x86_64” and select the qcow2 image.
The image uses the “user” variant by default, and can be updated using GNOME Software, or using the command line: sudo ostree admin upgrade
If you’d like to try the developer image, use sudo ostree admin switch GnomeOS:gnome-os/master/x86_64-devel
you can switch back to the user image using sudo ostree admin switch GnomeOS:gnome-os/master/x86_64-user
Lastly, I’d like to announce that we’re going to do an informal workshop on using BuildStream to develop GNOME components starting at 16:00 UTC on the GUADEC platform.
This is supposed to link to the latest build, but it seems to give a “Not Found” error (I guess because a new build is in progress). Anyway the latest build as of now is here
I’m finding these images really useful for testing, but with the caveat that they are often broken. Of course, that’s the purpose of the images – but as a developer testing a new feature branch, it would be useful to have a “latest known to be working” image, in addition to the current “latest build that may or may not get as far as showing the desktop” image. Some kind of automated testing is an important next step.
We currently don’t have infrastructure to tell you “this image boots and lands you in a working session”, like we used to have with the old Continuous VM images.
The release team is looking into adding some basic form of QA so we can identify “known to be working” images, and promote them to some staging area.
