The next big release of IPFire with version number 2.15 is finally coming. We have been working for over a year on some of the features like the new firewall GUI and there is so much more that the release log I wrote is over 7 pages when I would print it out.
We now released three beta versions. During the beta phase, we did not encounter any major issues so we are confident, that we have just one release candidate to go until we can finally release IPFire 2.15. But just putting out the ISO images and nothing more does not bring us any closer to the release. We need people who confirm that we indeed did a good job and that there are no bugs left.
Firewall Test Day
Because we replaced the old firewall GUI by a new one that was crowd funded on the IPFire wishlist, this major change also needs significant testing. The thread in German language on the IPFire forums is by far the longest one with almost a thousand posts. A lot of people already get themselves involved into development, translating, documentation and testing. Thanks for that. But every time we change something in the code, we need to test everything again to ensure that the change that fixed one issue does not create an other problem.
We are going to document the testing this time so that we can measure our progress. We got more installations of the beta releases than ever before, but the overall feedback was very silent. Is this a good sign so that we can assume everything is working well? We don’t know, yet. So please let us know.
On the IPFire wiki we created a couple of pages with tests that we want you to do. The firewall comes with a lot of features so that we could not add a test for each but the most important ones. If you want to help us testing, please head over to the wiki and do the following:
- Install IPFire 2.15 RC 1 or upgrade from a previous release. Please make sure that you don’t use an older release in which you may find bugs that have already been fixed.
- Have a look at the tests that there are to do. Simply pick one and execute it. You will find instructions about how to achieve this in the Firewall Documentation.
- On the bottom of this wiki page you will find a table in which you can add your testing results. You will also find instructions about how to do these tests on the page.
You don’t need to execute all the tests although this would be great. If you can only do a few, this will also help us very much. We are looking forward to see your results and hope that we reach a decent number of results very quickly, because only after that we will finally release this hot new version of IPFire.