Test Day on Thursday - block devices

So, we've got a bit of a hard sell: this week's test day is on the thrilling-sounding topic of...block devices. Please, try and stay awake! This is more important than it sounds :). Block devices are, to a basic approximation, what your Fedora install goes onto - your hard disk, or RAID array, or LVM volume, or whatever it is. The handling of block devices in Anaconda - the Fedora installer - has been rewritten for Fedora 11. So we really, really need to test it.

Here's the thing. If it works, nothing exciting happens, and you'll never really notice. All it means is that your install works, as you'd sort of really expect it to. However, if it breaks, we're totally stuffed, because your install isn't going to work. So even though this is not something super exciting and sexy, we really need people to come out and help test, because we need to test with a wide range of hardware and configurations to make sure we didn't break something really badly. It shouldn't be too hard to do testing, all you'll need is a spare system or partition to do a few Rawhide installs onto - we don't really care if the installed system works, we just need to make sure the stage where the Fedora partitions are created works properly and the install can succeed from there (or, at least, breaks for some reason entirely unrelated to the block device support rewrite). You can do useful testing with a small chunk of spare space on any machine, or even in a VM. So please, please, everyone - Red Hatters, l33t Fedora hackers, and people who are just reading this for the incisive Canucks analysis (go Alex!) and don't have a clue what Fedora is - come out on Thursday and help us get some testing done. There'll be developers and QA folks around to help you out with what exactly we need to test, so please just show up in #fedora-qa - see how to use IRC - and ask how you can help. Thanks a lot.