There’s also some very cool news: Till Maas has written a great new tool, Fedora Easy Karma, to make it easier than ever to file feedback on test updates. And now that we have the new development process for Fedora 13, with new packages going to updates-testing before they go to the main F13 tree, you can use the tool to provide feedback on Fedora 13 too!

Using it is incredibly easy: you just install updates from updates-testing – if you’re running Fedora 13, it’s enabled by default – reboot your system if the updates required it, and then run fedora-easy-karma at a console. It’ll generate a list of packages on your system that are from updates-testing, and ask you for feedback on each in turn, giving you a description of the update and all other feedback posted so far. If you can report whether or not it works for you, type 1 or -1 and then enter a comment. If you don’t want to vote up or down but do want to enter a comment, type 0. If you can’t offer any feedback on that particular update, press any other key and it’ll be skipped.

It’s way more efficient than figuring out yourself what packages are installed and using the web front end – you can really provide feedback on all packages this way, and it only takes a few minutes a day. Huge thanks to Till for the tool!

As is often the case, this event isn’t really that Fedora specific: the work Fedora does on webcam support in the kernel and libv4l of course goes upstream where other distributions use it, so even if you don’t use Fedora, come along to the Test Day, do the test with a Fedora nightly live CD so you don’t need to install any Fedora stuff, and send in your results; if you report a problem and get it fixed, the fixed will wind up in your distribution too. Isn’t open source great?

From the Guardian’s comment section:

MikeCawood wrote: ‘”Global warming” is simply a device used by Labour as a scam to screw more taxes out of the British population. Outside of that it doesn’t exist.’
lierbag: Ignore your detractors Mike. Unlike us, they just don’t realise that with the Earth being flat, any sea-level rises will be countered by the excess trickling over the edges.

heh. One pint for Mr./Ms. Lierbag, barman!

by 11:30am I was with a bunch of 20 people in the mezzanine of the Hyatt hotel, with 500 other people going completely nuts.

around 3pm, the entire hotel just went insane, and by 4pm we were all out on robson & granville – with about 200,000 other people – screaming and yelling and giving random high fives and generally going crazy. I mean, this is Vancouver – a city which sort of quietly prides itself on never taking anything too seriously – but today was…well, there’s no word to describe it. I wasn’t in Boston after the Red Sox won in 2004, but I guess it must’ve been about the same. I was in Manchester when United won the triple, and it was nothing like this. It was the kind of thing that only happens to a city very rarely, and it was just great to be there then.

apparently tickets for the upper deck were going at $5,000 before the game. probably wasn’t worth that. close, though!

in fifty years you’ll be able to say ‘crosby, vancouver, 2010′ and anyone alive in Canada at the time will know what you mean. probably nothing like that will happen again for a while. that was a really fun day.

This Thursday, 2010-02-18, will be Color Management Test Day. There’s some exciting new color management features in Fedora 13. That is to say, there are color management features in Fedora 13! We’ve never had any real color management in Fedora before, so this is great news for photographers and designers in particular – but everybody, really.

The good news is testing for this Test Day is very easy – anyone with a monitor can do most of the testing. A scanner, printer, webcam or colorimeter let you do some other tests. You don’t need a Rawhide installation to do the testing, just a nightly live image will do fine, and the testing process is fully documented and won’t take more than a few minutes. So come out and help us test! Even if you don’t use Fedora, you can test very easily with a live image, and this is one of those features that’s popping up in Fedora first but will soon appear in all distributions (as it’ll be part of GNOME itself), so you’ll be helping your own distribution by testing.

The Test Day will run all day in Freenode IRC #fedora-test-day. See this page if you’re not sure how to use IRC – or you can use WebIRC just by clicking this link! Ah, the wonders of science.

That’s Spring. What’s Spring? Well, it’s a fairly neat open source RTS framework that started out as a Total Annihilation clone, but more to the point, it’s a pretty complex 3D game. What’s cool about the picture? Well, it’s in the renderer info in the console (which you probably can’t quite make out, never mind). Yup, that’s Spring…running on Nouveau!

Huge kudos to the whole nouveau team for this. Nouveau’s 3D support recently became available in Rawhide / Fedora 13 with an update to the mesa-dri-drivers-experimental package. I was impressed when it ran Compiz, really impressed when it ran Neverball and Foobillard, but running Spring is nuts. Doesn’t seem to manage gnome-shell yet, but I’m sure they can fix that. I admit I never expected to see things working like that in such a time frame. Obviously it’s heavily hardware dependent, it doesn’t run super-fast (looked like about 20-25fps, just by eyeballing it, on my 9400 GT) and I haven’t stressed it much yet so it may be crashy, but still, that’s incredible stuff.

edit: it also runs Quake 3. Quake fricking 3!

The installation validation testing hasn’t changed greatly, but the test cases have been slightly reorganized to reflect the new release criteria, and also general changes in the Fedora world since the list was drawn up. A few have been removed and the test priorities have been reorganized to be based on the release for which the test must pass (Alpha, Beta or Final).

A bigger change is the introduction of desktop validation testing. As part of the new release criteria, we added some criteria which are not based on installation but on the functioning of the installed system. We’ve gathered up most of these into desktop validation testing, which will take place alongside installation validation testing. So alongside the installation validation testing results page for the test compose, there’s now a desktop validation testing results page. You can see the list of tests that will be performed there, and there will be a similar page created for each testing stage before the final release of Fedora 13. Columns are included for all major desktops, but only the default desktop results (GNOME) are able to block the releases, for now.

For more information on Fedora QA in general, see the QA page and the Joining QA page. If you have any questions about this testing, please contact the QA mailing list.

I’m hoping this testing goes well and helps us ensure that future releases have a desktop that works on a basic level out of the box. Please do pitch in and contribute tests to fill out the results page! I’d especially love to see results from all the non-default desktops in the matrix, KDE / Xfce / LXDE folks