Cooker is the development branch of OpenMandriva Lx. It reflects the current progress of work among all lines, and is considered a moving and unstable target.
## OpenMandriva technical overview
The OpenMandriva Lx distribution is made possible by two major fields of technical contribution:
- creation and maintanance of the tools, configuration and art special to the distribution (like the installer, the configuration center, themes,..)
- consistent packaging of several thousand different programs and libraries in order to make them available to the user in a simple and consistent way
You are invited to help in both fields and will find the guidelines and rules at these pages.
Advanced users feeling skilled enough to play and experiment with unstable releases, or developers for testing purpose, can download the latest cooker snapshot ISO files here:
freenode [webchat](http://webchat.freenode.net/?nick=chwido_fan&channels=%23openmandriva-cooker) interface to connect to IRC
- using [Matrix](/doc/chat-faq) (communication protocol)
- at the Cooker mailing list. You may [subscribe](https://www.openmandriva.org/lists) or view the archives at OpenMandriva forum [archive](https://forum.openmandriva.org/c/en/cooker);
we generally are not Technical Support, so please use the [issue tracker](https://issues.openmandriva.org/) for that purpose. But if you like to contribute or have technical interest or deep technical questions you will receive a warm welcome.
### Communication guidelines
IRC channel #openmandriva-cooker and Cooker mailing list are for technical communication and discussion only. While it is totally ok to ask for technical informations there please do not forget the netiquette.
{.align-left}The OpenMandriva development teams (Cooker & QA) are always looking for new contributors to assist in creating and maintaining packages and to assist bugfixing and testing. You are welcome to join us and help us in this work which is not only rewarding but also tremendous fun!
If you feel that your talents do not lie in the realm of software, then the OpenMandriva Workshop group, which is made up from the artwork, documentation, translation and Communication teams, is always open for the submissions of artwork and translations. New contributors who would like to help with these wide-ranging tasks should see the wiki for more details, and to learn how to join! Alternatively you may use our [Forum](http://forum.openmandriva.org/).
It also costs time and money to keep our servers up and running. If you can, please [donate](https://www.openmandriva.org/donate) to keep the lights on!
