QA's contribution to this year's outbreak of April Fool's japery is the hilarious announcement that Fedora 13 Beta will be delayed by a week. No, wait - it's not a joke, it's sad, soul-crushing reality! Wasn't that fun?

Unfortunately we were behind the curve with the generation of candidate builds throughout the Beta cycle (the Test Compose and first release candidate were both several days late) and so did not manage to identify all blocker issues in time for them to be properly resolved and all the validation tests successfully run. We're left with at least one known release criteria-breaking issue - a bug preventing unlocking of encrypted partitions when booting in text mode - and a Giant Void O' Uncertainty where we haven't completed the installation and desktop validation tests, so we can't say with confidence there are no other blocker issues lurking. So today's go/no-go meeting made the relatively easy decision to slip the Beta - and, now, the final release - by one week. We're sorry for the delay, which could possibly have been avoided with a harder effort, but we'll do our best to make sure the Beta does go out according to the new schedule, and that it meets all quality expectations.

In other news, tomorrow (apologies for the short notice!) is ABRT Test Day. Excuse the WikiMess, we're still working on the page and the test cases, but they should be fully finished in time for the event (well, in favourable time zones!) ABRT is every user's favourite, and every developer's least favourite, Fedora 12 feature - it's the tool that makes it dead easy to file an automated bug report when some application crashes. For Fedora 13 we'd like to make sure all the enhancements since the last Test Day are working correctly, and check that all the basics are still working right as well. You don't need any special equipment to take part in this Test Day, so please do come along and help out! The event runs all day on Thursday 2010-04-01 (there's that date again...) in #fedora-test-day on Freenode IRC.

Fedora 13 Beta is due to come out soon, with a following wind, and the QA group is already hard at work testing candidate builds. The first test compose is available, and the installation validation and desktop validation test matrices are up already; you can find information on those pages on getting the test compose and helping with the testing.

Next come the release candidate builds, when we'll run the matrices again and check the blocker bug list is addressed.

Just passing along this announcement from Tim Waugh, who's done a great job organizing this event! Mandriva readers - if I still have any - in particular may want to come along to this event, as Mandriva uses system-config-printer: everything we improve through this Test Day will benefit Mandriva as well as Fedora.

There will be a Printing Test Day this Thursday, 2010-03-25. Have access to a printer? Please come along and join in!

This is an opportunity to try out the new automatic printer driver installation feature in Fedora 13, as well as to give the printing system a bit of an exercise.

For the automatic printer driver installation to work properly we need your Device IDs! Many IDs are missing for current printers, and some existing IDs are incorrect. You can help fix this by running following the instructions in the test day page.

You don't need a Rawhide installation to provide useful feedback, just a nightly live image will do.

The Test Day will run all day in Freenode IRC #fedora-test-day.

Tim.

This being Google, of course none of your pages have feedback links, so I'm throwing this out here in the vague hope at least one Googler reads my blog...

You have a news post trumpeting the alternate Nexus One version with different HSPA frequencies. It mentions several times that it will work with 'Rogers Wireless' in Canada. This is true, but not complete. All the other major HSPA providers in Canada use the same frequencies, so it should work not just on Rogers but on Fido and on the new Telus/Bell combined HSPA network as well. You might want to mention that.

(If I were you I'd also advertise that 2100 frequency support a bit louder too: it's actually quite hard to find phones with the 850/1900/2100 combination which lets you use them in Canada or on AT&T and also in Europe. It's a feature. Tout it!)

There's always more testing to do, and this week is no exception: it's Test Day time again! This Thursday, 2010-03-18, is storage Test Day. Fedora 13 features several improvements to disk management, and this Thursday is our time to test them out! Anyone with a computer and a hard disk can do some of the testing, or if you have a more exotic configuration - many disks, RAID arrays, LVM setups, multichannel, SCSI or fibre channel configurations, anything like that - we'd love to get your results. Most of the testing can be done from a live environment, and live images are available for testing. As always, test cases with clear step-by-step testing instructions will be available on the Test Day page, so testing is easy! The Test Day runs all Thursday in #fedora-test-day on Freenode IRC. You can even connect via Web IRC.

It's probably another milestone for being away from the UK when British politics starts to look less like a serious topic and more like some kind of weird, Maury Povich-ish form of entertainment. I'm now wondering exactly why the Tories think there's some kind of mileage in attacking Labour for being - shock! - connected to unions.

I mean, this is still the Labour party, yes? The party that was formed out of trade unions in the first place, back at the start of the 20th century, expressly to represent the interests of the working man (yes, that was intentional, women couldn't vote at the time...) through the unions? Representing the labour unions is what the Labour party was formed to do, that's its purpose. Sure, Tony Blair did his best to torpedo the whole idea in the 90s and turn it into another party to represent the interests of the CBI (because, you know, just having the one isn't enough), but surely a decade is a little too short of an interval to let pass before you start screaming that being supported by labour unions is some sort of deep and dark shame for the Labour party?

Sigh. Bizarro-world is back. I wonder how long it'll be before the UK is like the US (and a few people in Canada who've been infected by US politics), where the captains of industry have managed the impressive trick of convincing people who work for $7 an hour in Wal-Mart with no benefits that the unions are their enemy...

So here's some quick news. We have the first blocker review meeting for Fedora 13 Beta tomorrow, at 16:00 UTC - 11am EST, 8am PST. That's in #fedora-bugzappers on Freenode IRC. As always, the more people the better, come along and share your wisdom! Especially if you have any potential blocker bugs to share.

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!

It's Test Day time again! This Thursday, 2010-03-11, is webcam Test Day. It's really pretty simple: if you have a webcam we want you to boot up a recent Fedora and check if it works. There's detailed instructions on the Wiki page but that's really what it boils down to - fire up your webcam, run Cheese or something like it, and make sure it all works well. If not, let us know about it! As always, the Test Day runs all Thursday in #fedora-test-day on Freenode IRC - see this page if you're not sure how to use IRC.

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?

Yes, it's not big, it's clever, but it is very funny.

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!

so at 9:45am today I was lining up to get into a restaurant in downtown.

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.