Printing Test Day today

Apologies for the short notice, but I got my wires crossed and thought this was on Thursday. But it is in fact...today! Yes, it's printing Test Day over in #fedora-test-day on Freenode IRC RIGHT NOW. Our printing guru, Tim Waugh, has logged off for the day, but the test cases are very easy to run and Tim will be back to look at any problems you find soon. We really need to test as many printers as we can, so if you have a printer and a pulse, please pop over to the Wiki page and run through a few of the tests for us! Thanks a lot.

Fedora 15 status and so on

So, how's that thar Fedora 15 going?

Pretty well, all things considered. We delayed the Beta by a week (adding to the one-week delay of Alpha to make a total delay so far of two weeks) due to the very late landing of NetworkManager 0.9, which was desired to make sure the GNOME 3 experience is complete (NM 0.9 is required for the 'native' Shell network status indicator/applet/thingy to work, without it you just get the old-style nm-applet). QA put our foot down and required a one week slip given how late this was in arriving, so now we have breathing room to get the Beta properly tested. If you're already following Fedora 15, please do install and test the Beta criteria. The Beta itself is due on 2011-04-19, so mark your calendars.

One thing I've found is that I'm liking GNOME 3 more and more recently. The polishing and tweaks that have landed in the last few weeks really seem to make a difference; with all the latest code and the new NetworkManager it feels like a very nice, put-together experience. Like someone said, it feels expensive. The dual-screen setup is handled a lot better now. I really like the finish the new default font (Cantarell) puts on things; it gives the desktop a recognizable 'face'. The slightly-hidden 'Power Off' option even gives you a 'Restart' button now (and there was much rejoicing). If you just sit back and enjoy the ride, it feels very shiny, and when you go back to a GNOME 2 desktop it looks a bit amateurish, to me anyway. There's still various bits missing that would make it a lot more awesome, which I hope will come in extensions and in 3.2 - I'd love for the Zeitgeist stuff to land and be really awesome - but I'm kinda enjoying it already.

A bit of news on my side projects. Poulsbo is not looking too healthy; I'm just getting immensely tired of that driver, and I did sell the Poulsbo system I had, so I really have no way to maintain it now. I might try and make sure it builds for F15, but that's about all.

There's some good news regarding Unity, though; the change to glew that I was waiting for arrived upstream, and ajax kindly let me patch it into the Fedora package, so once that update goes to stable, that roadblock is gone, and I can build nux, the last underpinning for the Unity stuff that I was waiting to get into place. Then I think I can actually build the Unity compiz plugin (which is all Unity really is, ultimately) and see if it flies. So that may actually go somewhere. Still no promises, though! Stay tuned.

Power Management Test Day on Thursday

The Fedora 15 Test Day schedule continues to roll, and this week it's the turn of power management. This event will concentrate on testing how well various common power management operations work on a range of systems, and also on testing the functionality of the new generation PowerTOP utility.

As this Test Day aims to test out existing functionality on a range of hardware, it's vital that we get as many testers as possible so we can find as many bugs as we can! The testing is easy, quick and will be possible entirely from a live CD - the Test Day team are currently working on creating the live CD. QA and development team members will be available all day to help you with testing and reporting your results. Full instructions are available on the Wiki page, and we'll be in #fedora-test-day on Freenode IRC all day long. If you don’t know how to use IRC, no problem – you can use WebIRC. If you click that link it will open the IRC channel (which is like a chat room) in a web page in any good browser.

Please do come along and help out on Thursday if you have a bit of spare time! Thanks a lot.

Test Days: GNOME last week, Preupgrade tomorrow!

Last Thursday was the second GNOME 3 Test Day, and despite a rather smaller turnout than the first event, it went off very well, with a good pile of bugs being exposed. Vitezslav Humpa, who along with Radek Lat helped to organize this event, posted a recap to the mailing list with a good overview of all the reported bugs.

Tomorrow is Preupgrade Test Day. As preupgrade is one of the recommended methods for upgrading Fedora, testing it ahead of release is a key task, and the more different configurations we test, the better. Due to some changes in how anaconda works in Fedora 15, preupgrade also needed some significant changes, so it needs the testing more than ever. You can test with a virtual machine or a real one, but you'll need an installed copy of Fedora 14 you don't mind losing, as this is an upgrade test! Please check out the wiki page for full instructions, and join the IRC channel - #fedora-test-day on Freenode IRC tomorrow to join in and chat directly with the QA team and preupgrade developers. If you don't know how to use IRC, no problem - you can use WebIRC. If you click that link it will open the IRC channel (which is like a chat room) in a web page in any good browser. Please do come along if you have the time and disk space to help test!

Second GNOME 3 Test Day this Thursday (2011-03-10)!

This Thursday, 2011-03-10, will be the second of three GNOME 3 Test Days. These events help both Fedora and GNOME ensure that GNOME 3 will be reliable and fully functional for its impending 3.0 release and for Fedora 15.

The first event was a great success in terms of turnout and bugs identified, so thanks to everyone who joined in, and we hope you will come out again for the second event. We will be re-running the tests from the first event to try and identify where issues have been fixed (or where regressions have occurred) and also running some new tests.

As with the first event, the testing will be easy and can be done entirely from a live image, there's no need to install an unstable Fedora release on your system. Even if you're not a Fedora user, you can join in with testing, and it will benefit all distributions, as any fixes will happen in upstream GNOME. The testing is split up into small chunks and you can help out in as little as ten minutes (plus the time it takes to download the live image). There are full testing instructions on the Wiki page, and Fedora QA and desktop team members will be in the IRC channel #fedora-test-day on Freenode all day long to help out with testing and with any questions you might have. If you don't know how to use IRC, you can use WebIRC - just click the link to open the chat channel in your browser.

This is a great opportunity to see the latest developments in GNOME 3 and help out the GNOME and Fedora projects at the same time, so please come along if you have time!

Internationalization and localization Test Week this week!

After the highly successful Graphics Test Week last week (thanks to everyone who came out! A full recap will be posted soon), it's another Test Week this week: this time for internationalization and localization. This is a hugely important area (the majority of Fedora users pick something other than English with a US keyboard layout) which we don't always test very comprehensively, so I'd like to say a huge 'thanks!' to Rui He, Igor Soares, and Aman Alam for their hard work in putting together these events.

The first Test Day, running tomorrow (Tuesday 2011-03-01), will be on translation and internationalization support in Anaconda (the Fedora installer). We'll be trying to weed out all those cases where translations and localization (particularly keyboard layouts and fonts) cause issues in the installer that are not encountered when testing the default, boring, US English path. If you are familiar with a non-US English language to the point of being able to complete a Fedora installation using that language and the appropriate keyboard layout for it, please come along tomorrow and help with the testing! Instructions and images for testing are available from the Wiki page, and the team will be in #fedora-test-day on Freenode IRC all day to help out. If you don't know how to use IRC (it's a real-time chat system), just use WebIRC.

Then, on Thursday 2011-03-03, we'll have Desktop Internationalization Test Day, which focuses on testing the internationalization support in key desktop applications. One particularly important aspect of this event will be testing special input methods for languages which require them, such as Chinese and Japanese. Again, if you're sufficiently familiar with a non-English language to use Fedora and some applications in that language, please do come along and help with the testing! This time you'll be able to do much of the testing from a live image with no need to perform an installation.

Looking ahead, the following Tuesday, 2011-03-08, is Desktop Localization Test Day. This event will look at localization in desktop applications - in other words, mostly translations.

Once again, these areas are key to all Fedora users who don't use US English - so if that describes you, or you're just smart enough to be able to help out, please do come along and help with this important testing! Also, if you're able, it would be great to have this news spread in Fedora- and Linux-related news sites in non-English languages, so please do go ahead and translate this post into your native language (or write a better one!) and submit it to your favourite news site. It'd also be great to have all Fedora language- and country-specific mailing lists and IRC groups made aware of these events. We can't promise to have speakers of every language in the world on hand to help out with testing, but we'll do our best! It would also help if people could translate the Test Day pages and test cases into other languages. See this page for instructions on how to do this within the Fedora Wiki.

It's Graphics Test Week again

Yup, it's that time again - Fedora Graphics Test Week! Tuesday is, well, my birthday, but far more importantly, it's Nouveau Test Day. Wednesday is Radeon Test Day. And finally, Thursday is Intel (graphics) Test Day. Note that those pages are not complete yet - in particular, they still point to the images from the last Test Week. Don't download those. There's no point any more. I'll be updating those pages tomorrow.

If you've never taken part in one before, Graphics Test Week is a set of Fedora Test Days where we test out the three major free graphics drivers for the three major graphics card manufacturers. Obviously, working graphics are important to almost all Linux users, so these test days are of interest to just about everyone. They are Fedora events and the test images are Fedora images, but since Fedora has a strong emphasis on working upstream, any fixes resulting from the event will go upstream straight away, and benefit all distributions - so even if you don't run Fedora, it's a good idea to come along and help contribute testing.

Testing is very easy and can be done entirely from a live image - there's no need to install Fedora pre-release onto your system. You can help with testing in only a few minutes, plus the time it takes to download a live image. All the information you need to test is present on each Test Day wiki page, and there will also be QA group members and Fedora graphics developers in the IRC channel - #fedora-test-day on Freenode - all day long to help you out. If you don't know how to use IRC, you can use WebIRC.

Even if you can't make the exact date for your graphics hardware, it's no problem - you can still carry out the testing and provide the results on the Wiki page. All you'll miss out on is the IRC chat. Do please wait until the updated images are made available tomorrow, though.

This release's Graphics Test Week is especially important as one of the things we'll be testing is compatibility with GNOME 3's GNOME Shell interface, one of the major new features of Fedora 15. It's very important to the GNOME and graphics developers to get a good picture of the compatibility of various graphics cards with GNOME Shell. This makes it even more important than usual to get a good broad base of hardware for testing, so if you can spare any time at all in the coming week, please do help out with the Test Week! Thanks very much.

Unity / Poulsbo / important things update

So, here's the thing. My work on Unity and Poulsbo is entirely voluntary: these are after-school projects. Here's the other thing: I have a pretty hit-and-miss west coast work ethic. Sometimes you'll find me working 80-hour weeks on things that really aren't that important, but at other times, you know, not.

Right now is more 'not'. I've been spending quite a bit of time lately on house cleaning, organizing some personal events, and falling down hills, and have had little time or inclination for doing much with Unity / Poulsbo. Unity is still stuck on this bug that the upstream maintainer promised to look at after Christmas (I last submitted a requested change on Jan 25 and it's been crickets since), but if I had the inclination I could have set up a side repo to carry on building stuff, or bugged ajax to include the patch anyway. I just haven't. It happens. No guarantees, don't rely on me too much. =)

Poulsbo, well, I'm just getting tired of that crap. I kinda expected some upstream movement on it by now, but no, me and a few other hapless souls for the other distros are still trying to patch up ancient crap code to work with modern kernels and X. I haven't checked if it's working in F15. It probably isn't. I'm not sure if I'll bother finding the time to fix it, frankly. I don't use my Poulsbo system much any more. I'll see what I can do, but again, no promises.

If anyone wants to help out with either of those things, please let me know and I'll find a way to cut you in. But just so everyone knows where things stand, right now if I have a choice between being up a mountain and poking through years old hideous Poulsbo kernel module code...I'm gonna be up the mountain. This goes for most of my extra-curricular stuff, Meego, Sugar, what have you, so I owe a few people things along those lines, I'm seriously slacking on that stuff, and I'm sorry. I may become more diligent again in a bit, or I may just go straight into summer slack-off mode (golf instead of hill-falling) and not become diligent at all. I guess you'll find out!

Of course, there's a lot more stuff that's more important that Red Hat is actually dumb enough to pay me to do, and that stuff gets done. Mostly. Only a few days late. =)

Tomorrow we have the Test Day for FreeIPA v2. Cards on the table, I know precious little about FreeIPA, but I can copy and paste a description from a Wiki page, and that description is "FreeIPA is an integrated security information management solution combining Linux, 389 Directory Server, MIT Kerberos, NTP, DNS and Dogtag Certificate server." Mostly this is gonna be interesting to existing FreeIPA users, but the developers have certainly organized the test cases nice and cleanly so you can do some testing I think without really knowing what the heck you're doing. So if you're at a loose end tomorrow, come along to #fedora-test-day on Freenode and give it a shot.

On Thursday we have the Xfce Test Day, assuming we can get a vaguely working image by then. There's a major new release of Xfce for Fedora 15, 4.8, so it'll be important to test the new features and make sure nothing has regressed with the update. If you're an Xfce user or just interested in Xfce or alternate desktops in general, do come along to #fedora-test-day on Freenode and help test the new Xfce out. It'll be easy and testable almost entirely from a live image that will be provided on the page.

We are also now in the TC (test compose) stage for the Fedora 15 Alpha release; TC2 came out today and needs both desktop and installation validation testing, so do please help out with that if you have time. Those pages will provide full instructions to help out with testing. TC1 and TC2 are both known to have a few significant issues, but lots of the testing is still valuable to identify further bugs that need to be fixed for the RCs and final Alpha.

Finally, a quick on-the-horizon alert: next week, February 22 through 24, will be X.org Test Week, and this is a big one since we really need to thrash on GNOME 3 compatibility especially. So get ready to come out and contribute results for your graphics card! The pages are mostly done but the test cases need some tuning and the pages currently link to the images from the F14 events (one of which isn't there any more), so, y'know, don't download those. new images will go up closer to the date for the F15 event.

GNOME 3 Test Day #1 recap

The first GNOME 3 Test Day took place on 2011-02-03 and went very well, thanks a lot to everyone who took the time to help out with testing!

Just preparing images for the test day exposed some important bugs to be fixed, and the event itself exposed many more. We had 56 tests run by slightly fewer testers (many thanks to those who tested multiple machines!) and the list of reported bugs looks like this (the hyperlinks take you to a list of the bugs within each Bugzilla):

Fedora Bugzilla

675049 NEW - brightness goes down when switch the screen mode 675237 NEW - [abrt] gnome-settings-daemon-2.91.9-1.fc15: Process /usr/libexec/gnome-settings-daemon was killed by signal 11 (SIGSEGV) 674986 NEW - X system freezes 674999 NEW - Changes to time zone in control-center don't stick 674987 NEW - [abrt] yelp-1:2.91.10-2.fc15: Process /usr/bin/yelp was killed by signal 11 (SIGSEGV) 674850 NEW - [abrt] gucharmap-2.33.2-3.fc15: Process /usr/bin/gucharmap was killed by signal 6 (SIGABRT) 674879 NEW - NTP Configuration Entry clears when focusing on another window 675014 NEW - Scrolling pages in presentation mode scrolls two pages 674939 NEW - Incomplete Toolbar Editor 675386 NEW - Zooming document larger past window size makes Evince loose window focus 674977 NEW - when switching on NTP date s-c-d crashes 674884 NEW - Clock in center top panel out of sync with date command and time displayed in D-T 675842 NEW - Starting totem in Gnome 3 crashes kernel 675013 NEW - totem do not start playing video until close firefox 674887 NEW - [abrt] mutter-2.91.6-2.fc15: Process /usr/bin/mutter was killed by signal 11 (SIGSEGV) 674877 NEW - gpk-distro-upgrade: warning dialog doesn't close by close button 675010 NEW - nouveau's 3D acceleration totally corrupts display, but Rawhide doesn't fall back to classic Gnome 675028 NEW - [GNOME3 Alpha Testday] Testcase desktop menus 675481 NEW - [GNOME3 Alpha Testday] Testcase gnome3 fallback 674871 NEW - cannot unmount a drive by button 675018 NEW - [abrt] nautilus-2.91.8-4.fc15: Process /usr/bin/nautilus was killed by signal 11 (SIGSEGV) 670511 ASSIGNED - SSSD and sftp-only jailed users with pubkey login 675212 CLOSED NOTABUG - EDID info missing after re-connecting monitor 674856 CLOSED RAWHIDE - [abrt] control-center-1:2.91.6-1.fc15: Process /usr/bin/gnome-control-center was killed by signal 11 (SIGSEGV) 674858 CLOSED RAWHIDE - [abrt] control-center-1:2.91.6-3.fc15: Process /usr/bin/gnome-control-center was killed by signal 11 (SIGSEGV) 675003 CLOSED UPSTREAM - display tool: "apply" button not available since was pressed for a first time 675005 CLOSED NOTABUG - display tool: configuration changes are not applied 675187 CLOSED RAWHIDE - [abrt] control-center-1:2.91.6-4.fc15: Process /usr/bin/gnome-control-center was killed by signal 11 (SIGSEGV) 674874 CLOSED RAWHIDE - shell bluetooth widget does not work 675049 NEW - brightness goes down when switch the screen mode

GNOME Bugzilla

605767 nautilus UNCO Manual eject and reinsertion of data CD causes phantom CD entry in computer:/// 627781 gnome-shell UNCO Show helpful tooltips for applications 641376 gvfs UNCO Two attempts required to save passphrase, SSH from file manager 641426 gnome-contro UNCO "Unknown action" shortcuts in Keyboard settings 641452 totem UNCO video playback hangs in totem when playing webm video 641458 gnome-contro UNCO if user changes background image, dropdown with effects disappears 641360 gnome-contro RESO FIXE gnome-control-center Date & Time crashes 641367 gtk+ RESO FIXE [region] gnome-applications ignore layout switching 641402 gnome-shell RESO NOTA using keyboard for navigation inside the gnome-shell menus 641425 gnome-themes RESO FIXE gnome3 mode looks bad 641431 gtk+ RESO FIXE Apply button goes grey after two mode switching 641433 totem RESO NOTA "right arrow" key stops the playback 641454 gnome-shell RESO NOTA Dash always adds application as favorite on reordering

We have some other bits of analysis to do, particularly about which systems hit the fallback path and how it worked for those systems, which I'll work on later. For now, thanks again to everyone who came to test, and to the desktop team for all their hard work helping prepare the stack for testing and helping out on the Test Day.

quick one

we had the GNOME 3 pre-Alpha Test Day. It was awesome. Bastien wrote it up really nicely. I went to bed, finally, and slept for a long time. Today I feel like I need to sleep a lot more and I'm going snowboarding for the first time ever tomorrow morning (I stress 'morning'). I sure know how to schedule things.

So! FUDCon photos are coming really soon I promise, and a proper write-up of the test day. But not yet, my pretties, not yet.