Test Days this week: kdump and GNOME Shell software rendering

Time to advertise some Test Days again!

Todayish - Tuesday, 2012-03-27 - is Kdump test day. This Test Day aims to test out the system-config-kdump tool, which lets you configure a variety of settings relating to kernel crash dumps - letting you trigger system actions when a crash dump happens, or have them stored on a remote system via ssh or NFS, for instance. If this sounds like something you'd be interested in, please come and check out the event!

Thursday 2012-03-29 will be GNOME Shell software rendering Test Day. Software rendering of GNOME Shell is one of the big new features of Fedora 17 - it allows the full, beefy goodness of the Shell to shine through even on systems without graphics drivers capable of sufficient acceleration to render the shell via hardware. Most obviously, virtual machines without 3D passthrough (such as the official Fedora virtualization stack). Of course, as this is a big new feature, we want to test it extensively to make sure it's stable and also to get some feedback on performance. So please come and help out! This Test Day isn't just one you can contribute to with a virtual machine - it's practically made for them. So you've got no excuse not to come and take part.

As always, the test day pages have full instructions for testing and returning your results, and you can come and join us on #fedora-test-day on Freenode IRC to chat with the developers and other Test Day participants. If you're not sure how to use IRC, see here, or just use WebIRC to connect to the channel and get chatting right away (as they say on all the best late-night commercials).