Stay informed about QA events

Hello, this is a reminder that you can easily stay informed about important upcoming QA events and help with testing Fedora, especially now during Fedora 32 development period.

The first obvious option for existing Fedora contributors is to subscribe to the test-announce mailing list. We announce all our QA meetings, test days, composes nominated for testing and other important information in there.

A second, not that well-known option which I want to highlight today, is to add our QA calendar to your calendar software (Google Calendar, Thunderbird, etc). You’ll see our QA meetings (including blocker review meetings) and test days right next to your personal events, so they will be hard to miss. A guide how to do that is here on our QA homepage.

Thank you everyone who joins our efforts and helps us make Fedora better.

Fedora videos from DevConf 2016 now available

Even if you’ve been to DevConf personally, you surely missed a lot of very interesting talks and workshops. All the videos are now available. Here are the Fedora related ones:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU1vS0speL2YytY0-1oxuNWXmfd1BHSd6

And here is the full list:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjT7F8YwQhr-Ox8LZY8VFrZHFkApOduBi

Enjoy!

FUDCon Milan 2011

This is a short trip report from FUDCon Milan 2011. Josef already described in long detail the joys and challenges of Milan city (and Italy in general), so I’ll stick with just the conference itself.

In the beginning we received a pretty T-shirt. I love receiving T-shirts. Then we explored the university. Our place consisted of two auditoriums and several smaller rooms. I have no idea how many people attended, I guess over a hundred. As we began to fill up the main auditorium, I quickly noticed the insufficient resource – electricity. There was only one usable socket at the end of the room. With a dozen people connected we quickly blew the fuse. Soon I started to envy people with netbooks and their 8 hours on-battery time.

After Jared welcomed us there was a barcamp. People proposed talks and we then voted them. The number of proposed topics and the available time and rooms matched quite well, so almost all talks were given the opportunity.

The first two talks I have attended were about RPM future & alternative packaging and about how Fedora is made from Rel-Eng perspective. The RPM talk was surprisingly relevant to us (us == Fedora QA team), because Jindřich Nový spoke about libsolv (IIRC the name), a library for dependency solving that should be incorporated directly into RPM or serve as a middle-men between RPM and YUM. All Fedora tools could then use this library for depsolving tasks. The API and capabilities should be better then what currently YUM can offer. (We just need to wait some time until everything is implemented, of course). That was extremely interesting, because we fight with depsolving issues in our depcheck test, as part of AutoQA test suite, and it’s a nightmare. This could help us substantially.

The second talk from Dennis Gilmore gave me a little perspective how RelEng team works when they create a new Fedora release. It is quite complex and they touch basically our parts of Fedora infrastructure. But I have now a little better idea and I’m glad for it.

And then… there was the AutoQA talk. Our talk. I talked about the recent changes in Fedora QA and about the near future. Josef Skládanka talked about his baby, ResultsDB. You can see the slides. There were some comments afterwards. There was a request whether we could execute upgradepath sooner, before you actually ask for push to stable in Bodhi. I believe we can’t do that (at least right now), but I’ll try to think about it more. Also we can’t execute your tests right now unfortunately, but it’s our goal in the future. And Josef promised to create KVM images (for server and client machines) for people interested in hacking AutoQA, because the installation is allegedly too difficult. Well, it is difficult. But you’ll have to learn how to use the Autotest+AutoQA framework even with the provided KVM images, so both approaches seem equally difficult for me. Simplification of server+clients deployment is also our near future goal, stay tuned.

I have attended a few more talks and Saturday was over. There was a FUDPub and hackfest day on Sunday. I did not participate directly in any hackfest, but I was present for Git tips&tricks and Java SIG sessions. I used the time to catch up with all the emails that accumulated during the trip.

Overall it was quite short FUDCon. But it kind of matched the experience of the last year’s one in Zurich. I met some people, I learned something new. But I am still curious how the american FUDCons look like. Are they different? I hope I will see some of them too in the future.

LinuxExpo Prague 2011

Yesterday I attended Linux Expo / Open Source Conference 2011 in Prague. Together with my colleagues (Jaroslav Řezník, Vítězslav Humpa, Jiří Eischmann) from Red Hat we formed a crew of a small Fedora stall at this conference. A few other Red Hat guys (Luděk Šmíd, Jan Pazdziora, Petr Kovář) prepared presentations for this conference.

Our task was to present Fedora to people, give away some small treats (CDs, stickers, pins) and discuss anything about Fedora with visitors. We decided to attract them by showing the two major desktop environments that will be present in Fedora 15 – Gnome 3 and KDE 4.6.

Let’s see some photos!

The main rush-hour was in the morning, where many students came and asked about Fedora project. But even in the rest of the day we were all constantly busy. Many people came to get their hands on the upcoming Gnome 3 and asked about the differences. We have met a lot of people that came to discuss their experiences with open source world or asked for advice with some Linux-related problems.

We were not alone there, our competitors were all around us 🙂

In the evening after the conference ended we moved to a pub where we tasted Bernard beer and talked about our interests together with competitor colleagues. I met a bunch of people I had known before only virtually, so I’m very glad for that.

OpenLDAP/NSS Test Day – Thursday 2010-10-14

Dear Fedora Comunity,

We would like to draw your attention to forthcoming Fedora Test Day focused on OpenLDAP [1] with TLS encryption.

The crypto implementation for TLS/SSL was recently changed from OpenSSL to Mozilla Network Security Services (MozNSS). And there are 88 packages depending on openldap-clients or libldap. All these packages can be affected by this change and we want to be sure, that nothing got broken.

We would be very glad, if you could join this event!

As usual, all the information can be found on Test Day wiki site:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2010-10-14_OpenLDAP/NSS

The Test Day will happen on Thursday 14th October in #fedora-test-day on Freenode IRC.

Thanks & Regards,
The Test Day Team (Jan Zeleny, Jan Vcelak, Rich Megginson, Ondrej Moris)

[1] http://www.openldap.org/

FUDCon Zurich 2010 – part 2

This is a continuation of the last post.

On Saturday morning there was another keynote from Jared:

And then it was my time – time for AutoQA!

My talk went quite well, I said everything I had wanted to say, I think I did not forgot anything, I even had an animated pony! I did not particularly excel with my pronunciation, but I think everyone were able to understand. After my talk a long discussion unleashed. Some people got so deeply involved in the discussion with the rest of the audience that I nearly didn’t get any chance to respond to all that arguments 🙂

Most arguments involved annoying warnings in rpmlint output and how to do that without infuriating the package maintainers receiving our emails. This is certainly something we have to solve before using AutoQA for “real tasks” (blocking some updates etc).

The rest of the conference went just fine, unfortunately I have no photos because the batteries in my camera died. After the conference finished, we had a FUDPub event – a dinner in il postino pizzeria. I liked the food, I liked the beer and it was a good place for socializing. A great evening.

Sunday morning a barcamp-style conference began. Topic proposals were presented by anyone interested in giving a talk/workshop and people then voted according to their preferences. Finally a schedule was made.

Unfortunately we had to leave early (it’s a long ride to Czech Republic), so I was able to attend only one presentation about setting up private Koji instances:

Then there was a pizza ordered for lunch in a nearby cafeteria. We had a lunch and then we left. We took Jesse Keating with us to Brno where we will give a talk about Fedora on a local university and then fly back to the USA.

On the way home we stopped at the Rheinfall – which should be the largest waterfall in Europe. Quite a nice sight.

End of the weekend, end of the story. Thanks to Red Hat for sending me there.

FUDCon Zurich 2010 – part 1

I have finally some time to write about FUDCon in Zurich. So here it goes!

We set out on Thursday. One blue (Fedora) and one red (Red Hat) van – 16 people or so in total:

The journey from Brno to Zurich was really long, about 10 hours.

First night we were accommodated in the Atlantis Hotel:

Then we went to check out the nightly Zurich. Unfortunately my camera is crap and can’t take shots at night, so everything is blurred (these pictures are the best):

Zurich night city, its old buildings and alleys are just amazing. On the other hand Zurich is also amazingly expensive. I’ve never seen a more expensive city. Everything shines with luxury, the stores glitters full of jewelery, people drive expensive cars. The prices of goods and services reflect this really closely. If you want to spend all your salary, this is a good place to go 🙂

Friday morning we arrived at FUDCon:

At the reception we received name cards to be attached on our chest, we signed some agreements about publishing our talks (but they weren’t recorded in the end I think) and we received FUDCon t-shirts! 🙂

In the first floor there were stands from several opensource projects where you could chat about them:

One floor below, Jared Smith had the introductory keynote:

Our Czech group formed quite a significant portion of the audience 🙂 I was quite surprised, I expected more people in the audience.

A grinning Josef!

After Jared finished, Adam Williamson finally told us what it is that we (Fedora QA) actually do 🙂

In other rooms FrosCamp was happening, I visited one of their presentations:

And some more FUDCon presentations:

The last presenter of the day was Máirín Duffy. She talked about GIMP and Inkscape, about ponies and lolcats. It was funny, I loved it. And I can make my own pony now!

After the conference was over we visited FrosCamp party “Wired Dreams”. But the music wasn’t quite according to my taste, nor was the FreeBeer – sorry, opensource.

For the night we moved into a Swiss military bunker. Not exactly the best accommodation you can find, but a great experience 🙂

End of Friday!

OpenSCAP Test Day – Thursday 2010-08-26

An OpenSCAP Test Day is coming up tomorrow – Thursday 26th August:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2010-08-26_OpenSCAP

OpenSCAP is a tool for maintaining the security of systems, such as automatically verifying the presence of patches, checking system security configuration settings, and examining systems for signs of compromise. It is accepted as a feature for the upcoming Fedora 14 [1].

Security controls that are recommended by DISA[2] and NSA[3] for RHEL5 Desktop systems were migrated into Fedora and stored in SCAP content. Tools capable of handling with such a content are delivered too. So if this sounds interesting to you, now is the best time to give it a try! 🙂

Test instructions are easy to follow, you just go a few test cases and fill the results into a matrix. OpenSCAP developers are available for support and inquiries on an IRC channel.

The Test Day runs from 9:00 to 17:00 UTC [4] in #fedora-test-day on Freenode IRC.
Hope to see you there!

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/OpenSCAP
[2] http://www.disa.mil/
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nsa
[4] http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?year=2010&month=8&day=26&hour=9&min=0&sec=0

Esmska in the Czech Open Source 2010 Awards

Well this is a surprise. I was invited to the Internet and Technology 10 conference, that – as the name suggests – is mainly about present and future Internet technologies (DNSSEC, IPv6, etc). It’s happening in Prague this Monday and Tuesday, you can watch it live (Czech language only, sorry). One part of it was announcing the results of Czech Open Source 2010 Awards. It is a poll where jury and the public vote for the most favorite software, project, event, celebrity, blog and company (6 categories) that is related to open-source. I was invited in for my personal project Esmska, as for the Software category. There were also a few fellow RedHatters with me – Martin Sivák as the representative for the LinuxAlt event and Radek Vokál as the representative for the Red Hat company.

As you might expect, there’s a reason I wrote this blogpost. Yes, there is. Esmska won the third place in the public vote and the first place in the jury vote. Yay! (I still don’t understand why, though…) On the next photo you can see me receiving the award and a chocolate notebook as a prize 🙂

What is Esmska, anyway? It is a front-end to web SMS gateways. Believe it or not, in some countries it is very popular to send loads of SMS messages. Some mobile providers have even free SMS gateways available on the web. Therefore many users use them instead of typing the messages on the phone. This is particularly true for middle and eastern Europe countries like Czech Republic, Slovakia or Poland. Esmska may be very handy for them because it provides contact list, history or mass messaging features for them. If you think you could use it, check out its website. Free web gateways are suitable only for a few countries, but you can always use a paid international gateway sending anywhere to the world.

The chocolate notebook (well, the keyboard) was quite good for a piece of computer hardware 🙂

Not only I have been awarded. LinuxAlt was the first in the Event category in the jury vote, so Martin Sivák obtained the prize too. Photo below. Red Hat unfortunately didn’t win the Company category, so no chocolate for Radek Vokál.

The ultimate winner (regardless of category) was program FreeRapid Downloader. PiracyLegal content downloading rules the world 🙂

Overall it was a nice event, I enjoyed it.

Celebrate April Fools’ Day with ABRT!

Yes, it’s here again, the April Fools’ Day! If you don’t have your own plans already, let me propose one for you – participate on the ABRT test day!

ABRT is a tool that helps reporting program crashes with a few simple mouse clicks. It is a significant part of Fedora operating system and its functionality is important for almost every Fedora user.

Are you curious what have ABRT developers prepared for you on the Fool’s Day? Do you want to know what surprises are awaiting you? Then you should come and see for your own eyes!

Help us make ABRT perfect on May 1st from 11:00 to 21:00 UTC! Visit: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2010-04-01_ABRT

PS: This is *not* a joke 🙂