As we prepare for the release of NitroShare 0.2 (the first stable release), we need your help testing the application. We want to make sure this release is stable and reliable.

There are two ways you can help us test NitroShare. We require that you either have two computers or that you have VirtualBox installed. NitroShare is currently only available for Windows and Linux, so any machine you use for testing must be running one of those two operating systems.

Installing NitroShare on Linux

If you are using Ubuntu, you can install NitroShare from our PPA by entering the following commands in a terminal:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:george-edison55/nitroshare
sudo apt-get update ; sudo apt-get install nitroshare

If you are not using Ubuntu or you would like to compile NitroShare from source, you need to first make sure that you have all of the build dependencies installed:

• Qt (version 4.7+ required)
• QJson
• qxmlrpc

You will also need to install Bazaar in order to fetch the latest source code from the Launchpad repository. Once you have installed Bazaar, you can enter the following commands into a terminal to fetch the source and build the application:

mkdir nitroshare ; cd nitroshare
bzr init ; bzr pull lp:nitroshare
qmake ; make

If all goes well, you should end up with an executable in the current directory which you can run with ./nitroshare.

Installing NitroShare on Windows

We provide an installer for Windows which you can download from here:

http://files.quickmediasolutions.com/nitroshare/nitroshare_0.2_win32.exe

Running NitroShare in VirtualBox

Even if you do not have two machines to use for testing NitroShare, you can still test the application by installing it in a virtual machine. This is not terribly difficult and provides an easy way to transfer files to and from your VM without installing VirtualBox's Guest Additions or resorting to something complex like FTP.

Once you have NitroShare installed on each machine, open the settings dialog for the guest OS. Ensure that the network adapter is set to "Host-only Adapter" as shown below:

Now start the application on the host and the guest. Follow the instructions in the configuration wizard and the two instances of NitroShare should automatically discover each other.