Dear Ubuntu Studio Developers, Contributors and Users,

The first beta of Ubuntu Studio’s development release, Ubuntu Studio 13.10 (Saucy Salamander), will be released on Thursday, 5th September, 2013. I would like to call for testers.

This release is a very exciting one as we have added a new set of features to the development release, including:

* A new menu structure which works on any desktop environment. Len Ovens and Mish did a great job on moviing various apps to the right submenu and creating new menu icons.

* A new package named ubuntustudio-installer, which allows any person to install our metapackages and can fit into any desktop environment.

* Instead of a settings menu, we have fitted in a new Settings Manager, with all settings in one place.
Grub fixes

* When you are in the GRUB Menu, the boot item for Ubuntu Studio will show “Ubuntu Studio” instead of “Ubuntu”. Also, the latest -lowlatency kernel will be always the default boot item in the GRUB boot loader.

* The XFCE session in the LightDM is removed to avoid any confusion with the Ubuntu Studio session.

You can find the Ubuntu Studio pre-Beta 1 images at http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/dvd/current.

Find the testcases in the Ubuntu ISO QA Tracker (http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/milestones/302/builds) for Ubuntu Studio and follow them (along with https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/ISO/Walkthrough as a reference document) to test the images.

After you have tested them, report the results in the ISO QA Tracker.

Make sure you DO report any bugs you found and report them using ubuntu-bug in your terminal or Launchpad (https://launchpad.net).

Enjoy the testing and let’s make the release happen!

Regards,
Howard Chan (smartboyhw)
Ubuntu Studio Release Manager