Ubuntu: Up and Running

Alpha and Beta Releases

Although I covered the Update Manager at the end of Chapter 2, there was one item I left out until you were ready, which is how you can upgrade to alpha and beta tests of new Ubuntu releases.

If your computer is used for important tasks or contains valuable data, you should never install beta software on it (let alone alpha). But if you have a computer on which you are prepared to lose all your data and reinstall the operating system if the worst should happen, it’s a candidate machine on which you could play with prerelease versions of Ubuntu.

New editions of Ubuntu are released every six months, preceded by various alpha and beta tests available for people who are willing to test them and report any bugs found back to the developers. You can also install them purely out of curiosity if you wish, as there’s no requirement to report bugs.

The new editions are usually released in April and October, so the alpha tests are generally available from about January to February and July to August. However, these will be the most unstable versions and are recommended only for seasoned Linux users.

But each March and September, the beta releases come out. These are much more stable and can be fun to install to see what’s coming up in the forthcoming edition. So, bearing all my prior warnings in mind, if you still want to go ahead and check for an alpha or beta test, you can open up the Terminal and enter the following command:

sudo update-manager -d

After entering your password, ...