Test day update: tomorrow is Dracut test day

It's that time of the week again: test day time! There was no Fit and Finish test day this week, but tomorrow - 2009-08-27 - is Dracut test day. This is a very important test day, as Dracut is a vital new piece of infrastructure for Fedora 12. Dracut is intended to replace mkinitrd and nash for the purpose of generating the initrd. The initrd is a disk image which is loaded alongside the kernel, containing the necessary drivers for the initial boot process to proceed and access your real hard disk partitions where Fedora lives. Obviously, if there's a problem with the initrd - your system won't be able to boot. So it's vital for as many people as possible to test Dracut in as many situations as possible so we can be sure it's bulletproof.

Dracut may well replace mkinitrd in other distributions in future too, so even if you don't use Fedora - hi, Mandriva readers! - it's probably in the best interests of you and your distribution to come out and help test at least the live CD (which obviously won't require you to install Fedora at all). We're happy to get testing from anyone!

Involved testing will require some manual configuration and possibly an installed Rawhide system. However, basic testing can be carried out simply by booting a live CD image and reporting whether or not it works, so there's no excuses for not doing the basic test! The wiki page has comprehensive instructions on testing, so please come along to the test day tomorrow and let us know how it works for you. The test day will be held in the Freenode IRC #fedora-test-day channel all day tomorrow (please note the relatively new IRC channel, we're not doing them in #fedora-qa any more). If you need any help on using IRC, see this page.