This week is Graphics Test Week!

It's that good ol' time again: Fedora 18 Graphics Test Week is here.

It all kicks off tomorrow (or today, depending on your timezone) - Tuesday 2012-09-25, with Nouveau (NVIDIA) Test Day. Then Wednesday 2012-09-26 is Radeon Test Day, and Thursday 2012-09-27 is Intel (graphics) Test Day.

These events are simply meant to let us check on how the major graphics drivers (over 95% of the systems running Fedora use NVIDIA, ATI or Intel graphics) are working with real-world hardware for the upcoming Fedora release. All you need to take part is a system with one of these graphics adapters, a USB stick or optical disc writer, and a little time. We provide a live image for testing, and all you have to do is boot it up and check some basic graphics functions.

Full test instructions are on the Wiki pages. The live image download links are not yet active but will soon go up (in the next few hours). We also encourage testers to join the #fedora-test-day channel on Freenode IRC: members of the Fedora QA team and graphics development team will be around to help you with the testing process and also to take a look at any bugs that you might find. If you're not a regular IRC user, you can find instructions here, or you can simply click here to join the channel (chat room) through a Web front end.

So please, if you have a few spare minutes to help out, come along! Although we assign specific days to each manufacturer, if you can't come on the 'right' day, just come along on one of the others and we'll make do.

Even if you're not a Fedora user, please consider joining in - all the distributions share the same graphics drivers, and the versions in Fedora (in these test images particularly) are very new. The Fedora developers are major upstream developers, and any fixes that come from these test days will go upstream for all distributions to benefit from soon. And since the testing uses a live image, you don't even need to install Fedora!