Test Drive

One specific tool used by both volunteers and developers that deserves a mention is Test Drive. When he wrote Test Drive, Dustin Kirkland was an Ubuntu developer on Canonical’s Ubuntu Server team (he still develops for Ubuntu as a community member, but has moved on to another job). He was looking for an easy way to download and run the latest daily development snapshot of Ubuntu using a virtual machine such as KVM or VirtualBox. Like any good developer who doesn’t want to repeat tasks unnecessarily, he wrote a tool to automate the process. While creating Test Drive, he made it configurable to use different virtual machines with different settings according to the user’s taste. It can even download and run any ISO that may be accessed ...

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