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Life, hardware tinkering and my grandmother

Thursday, Mar 13th, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Hard to believe it’s the middle of March already. My 9 weeks of Couch-to-5K has been stretched out a bit due to getting another cold a couple weeks ago and then working from the office in Sunnyvale for a week, which left very little time for exercise. I re-did a couple interval runs from earlier in the week to get back up to par, and I’m on schedule to finish week 7 tomorrow. On Friday I’m taking a redeye to visit my mother, sister and nephew in Maine so it looks like Sunday’s run will be and interesting one done dodging snow banks!

In project work I finally managed to move my primary desktop to a RAID1 array. As is with most of these projects, it waited until I started getting disk errors…and a bit longer, before I was forced to complete this. It took me longer to do than I anticipated due to attempts to use the Ubuntu graphical installer to set up RAID+LVM, at some point I gave up and used the MinimalCD which uses the ncurses Debian Installer, my favorite!

I was also happy to join Rupa Dachere and Serpil Bayraktar this past Sunday to work on the Raspberry Pi tutorial we’re presenting next month. Our experiences that day gave us a whole list of notes about what we’ll need for attendees and possible problems that may occur on site. Plus, I was able to hook up my Pi via console for the first time, which was fun.

A couple weeks ago I also helped organize an Ubuntu Documentation Day, summary here. The Documentation team has really been transformed over this past year and I’m proud of the work the team has been doing to attract and onboard new contributors, which this day was a part of.

In less cheerful news, I took the loss of my grandmother a bit harder than I expected. I think this was in part due to there being no scheduled service of any kind right now and distance from family, I felt isolated. I think visiting my sister next week will help. MJ and I are also planning to go back to Philadelphia to visit some time this spring and hope to make it up to Ridgewood to visit the Schoolhouse Museum that my grandmother worked with for many years and was always a highlight of my trips to visit them. It will be nice to relive some memories. Her obituary is here.

This week MJ and I went to a hockey game, with promise of a good game with the Sharks playing the Toronto Maple Leafs. The Sharks one 6-2 in a brutal but enjoyable game, for Sharks fans anyway! I hosted an Ubuntu Hour on Wednesday night but skipped the Debian Dinner so I could get home and work on a project.

I’m looking forward to this trip to Maine. My sister keeps insisting that it’s boring and cold there, but I think that’s the change of pace I’m looking for. Plus, I’ll be working throughout the week and playing with my nephew, so I can’t get too bored!

Filed under: computers, family, life

OpenStack Infrastructure March 2014 Bug Day

Tuesday, Mar 11th, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Today the OpenStack Infrastructure team hosted their third bug day of the cycle.

lady bug chocolate lollipops

First, I created our etherpad: cibugreview-march2014 (see etherpad from past bug days on the wiki at: InfraTeam#Bugs)

Then I run my simple infra_bugday.py script and populate the etherpad.

Then I grab the bug stats from launchpad and copy them into the pad so we (hopefully) have inspiring statistics at the end of the day. Once bugday makes it into infra proper I hope to update that to include us too, there is a bug for that, which I updated today.

Then comes the real work. I open up the old etherpad and go through all the bugs, copying over comments from the old etherpad and making my own comments as necessary about obvious updates I see (and updating my own bugs).

Last step: Let the team go to town on the etherpad and bugs!

As we wrap up, here are the stats from today:

Bug day start total open bugs: 293

  • 50 New bugs
  • 51 In-progress bugs
  • 5 Critical bugs
  • 23 High importance bugs
  • 15 Incomplete bugs

Bug day end total open bugs: 245

  • 0 New bugs
  • 45 In-progress bugs
  • 4 Critical bugs
  • 24 High importance bugs
  • 21 Incomplete bugs

Thanks again everyone!

Filed under: openstack, tech

OpenStack TripleO mid-cycle sprint kicks off

Thursday, Mar 6th, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On Monday, March 3rd, we kicked off the TripleO (“OpenStack on OpenStack” ) mid-cycle meetup at the HP offices in Sunnyvale, California.

The day began by splitting up into groups with our specific focuses, including Ironic (bare metal) and Continuous Integration, where I ended up.

I was able to spend the day following up on a couple patches I had outstanding for the work I’ve been doing with Fedora on the infrastructure side and get some work done on another patch.

After lunch, Derek Higgins of Red Hat gave participants a walk through of how we’re doing testing, with a tour of the setup for our testing environments and the “TripleO cloud” itself that’s currently being used for testing, running on a rack of servers provided by HP.

After the tour, he made the diagram he used available to get a better picture of everything:


(Click for full version)

My day wrapped up by having a chat with some folks from Mirantis about some of their multi-node testing plans and how that may tie in to the work we’re doing in TripleO and the rest of infra.

The rest of the week so far has been spent over at the Yahoo! offices in Sunnyvale. Most noteworthy to what I’m working on, the Red Hat folks were able to make progress on getting their own rack up to supplement the current testing rack from HP in order to have redundancy in testing. I was also able to make progress in getting Fedora into the testing pool and had the opportunity to use the high bandwidth time with colleagues to work on some SELinux issues I’ve been running into and do some in person debugging.

Last night HP sponsored a fun dinner for all sprint attendees down at Gordon Biersch in San Jose. Today, Thursday we’re continuing our work which will wrap up tomorrow.

Filed under: events, openstack, tech

Sharing the Beauty: Stained Glass Class

Tuesday, Mar 4th, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On Sunday, March 2nd MJ and I headed over to Sherith Israel to attend a class by Ian Berke to learn about the stained glass throughout the historic building.

I didn’t know anything about stained glass, so the first thing we got to learn was the two main types of glass that are featured throughout the building: opalescent glass and painted glass. The painted glass was often in the 20th century Gothic revival style, with more stiff looking characters and simple colors and styles. The glass is stained in the traditional “pot metal” method where different types of metal are added to create different colors, copper for green, gold for red, cobalt for blue. I’m a fan.

The majority of the windows were of opalescent glass, an American innovation from the late 1800s pioneered by Tiffany and others. It requires multiple layers of glass that are colored with bone ash and other materials to make them a bit more flowing and dynamic than the flat colored painted windows. On these windows enamel was then used to paint features like faces, which allows for precise details but fades more quickly.

I have never gotten really close to stained glass windows before, so this was an opportunity to do so and see how thick and layered they tend to be, with intentional textures that you can feel on some of the windows, particularly the opalescent ones, to lend to the design. We also learned the basics of how a window is made, starting with either a pre-designed pattern or a design created for the window by the artist (both types are in the building) and then following the pattern in a full size printout/drawing that they cut and match the glass to match.

We also learned how expensive these windows were, and still are. Restoration for the massive Moses window on the west side of the building will cost almost $400,000 and has to be done every 100 years or so as the lead in the window starts to become brittle, risking the structural integrity of the window.

This was one of my favorite classes so far. I’m really looking forward to the class about the organ with Jonathan Dimmock coming up on March 23rd.

I have uploaded photos I took during the class here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157641770774454/

Filed under: events, spirituality

SCaLE12x

Monday, Feb 24th, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

In my previous post I talked about my Ubucon presentation at the Southern California Linux Expo this year and the Ubuntu booth that was busy throughout the weekend. There was much more to SCaLE12x than Ubuntu though!

On Friday I also had the opportunity to participate in the Infrastructure.Next event on Friday with a presentation on Open Source Systems Administration. This was a late addition to the schedule, and the session was only 30 minutes long so it wasn’t too much work to me to put it together quickly. As with the rest of SCaLE12x, I was happy to have a friendly, engaging audience which made for a comfortable presentation.

Slides from that talk are available here: scale_infra_opensource_sysadmin.pdf.

Friday night I enjoyed the series of UpSCALE talks, followed by the evening keyntoe by Lawrence Lessig. I saw Lessig speak over a year ago on the topic of campaign finance and government reform. I remember leaving that talk feeling a bit sad and hopeless about the situation with our government here in the US. This talk was in the same vein, but he had more positive news for actionable things that people (particularly tech people) could do to help. He also was able to showcase NHRebellion.org and the walk they did in January to gain support for their campaign finance reform efforts. The talk still made me a bit sad, because things are such a mess, but it is an important topic and I am inspired by seeing him to come the conference to speak about it.

Other highlights of the conference included a talk by Dmitri Zimine on OpenStack vs. VMWare. Predictably, as we were at an open source conference, OpenStack tended to come out on top for a long term investment of a large deployment. Of particular focus was the open source nature of OpenStack, allowing fixes to be deployed as quickly as you can patch them. The case was made for admin UIs that were easy to use in VMWare, but his message tended to be that for large deployments the administrators really should be leveraging APIs and mechanisms of automation through scripts rather than relying upon APIs. Expectedly, he urged technologists to embrace this and improve their skill set in this direction in order to remain successful and competitive in this growing market.


The slide from Dmitri’s talk that spoke to me the most!

It was also interesting to hear from Jason Hibbets in his talk Open Source ALL the cities where he recounted his significant experience with government in Raleigh, North Carolina and the book he wrote to help other communities, with resources at theopensourcecity.com. A copy of his book now resides on my Nook (which I did buy from bn.com to support it) and I’m looking forward to learning more, it was inspiring to hear of such grassroots efforts in the technology sphere make a serious difference in local policy and quality of life.

I had a third talk at the conference that landed on Saturday evening on Code Review for Systems Administrators. The time slot was pretty packed with cool talks, so as I saw people trickle in to fill the room I was really pleased. The audience was engaging and I was able to answer some really interesting questions, which spilled over into discussions on Sunday as well. I really love the work I do so it was exciting to talk with others who share my unusual passion for process in this sphere.

Slides available here: http://docs.openstack.org/infra/publications/2014-scale12x-sysadmin-codereview/

On Sunday I was able to attend my colleague Clint Byrum’s talk OpenStack, Deploy thyself – TripleO. I’m already quite familiar with the project, but stepping back and getting a higher level view of it, along with a clearer picture of ideas moving forward is always a fun experience.

From there I headed over to the CentOS Project Q&A Forum. Given the recent rumblings in the Ubuntu community about licensing and trademarks around derivatives such as Linux Mint (which doesn’t go the extra step that CentOS does with the recompiling of binaries and avoiding trademark issues), I thought this would be a good opportunity to learn more about the direction Red Hat is taking. It was interesting to learn that this new collaboration that CentOS will begin to develop communities focused on different respins of the OS, which reminded me of the community-maintained flavors that have always been a part of the Ubuntu family. It seems that Red Hat and CentOS are moving closer to what Ubuntu has traditionally done and Ubuntu and Canonical are finally picking up some of the licensing and trademark slack that they’ve allowed with derivatives. I hope both companies and communities find a happy balance here, and as a Xubuntu contributor am certainly a big fan of flavors and respins that operate within the same community as their parent or source distribution. I find it strengthens the trust community-wide from users to developers, leads to higher quality products and makes for a healthy working relationship.

At the end of the day I had the opportunity to meet with Goran Hainer, a volunteer from the Brooks & Brooks Foundation about his work putting Linux-based desktops into disadvantaged spaces in Los Angeles. He had heard of my work with Partimus and was keen to learn from our experience in schools in the San Francisco bay area. Fortuitously, we also happened to be sitting next to someone else who was active in the space, but with a focus on providing high speed internet access to those in need. There was much swapping of success stories, challenges and business cards. I tend to be pretty shy at conferences, but when I’m able, this kind of amazing discussion is what makes an experience at SCaLE complete.

More photos from the event are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157641493306483/

Filed under: events, tech, travel

5 ways to get involved today: Wrap up

Sunday, Feb 23rd, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On Friday, February 21st I gave my talk on 5 ways to get involved with Ubuntu today at the Southern California Linux Expo’s Ubucon.

I had a great audience who I was able to have some wonderful and inspiring chats with following my talk. There’s clearly a lot of interest in further involvement by user-level contributors, so I’m happy that the work I’ve been doing to improve on-boarding for projects I participate in will be valuable.

I’ve uploaded slides from the talk here: 5WaysToGetInvolvedWithUbuntuToday.pdf

You can also browse the companion blog posts I’ve been writing these past couple weeks leading up to the conference:

I really enjoyed the experience, huge thanks to Richard Gaskin for delivering another great Ubucon.

Finally, the Ubuntu booth put on by members of Ubuntu California has really been doing well this weekend, so thanks and congratulations to everyone who has been participating.

Filed under: events, LoCo, tech, travel, ubuntu planet

Grandmother Krumbach

Wednesday, Feb 19th, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

This morning I lost my grandmother, my father’s mother, who we all referred to affectionately as Nana. She was 90 years old.

It was a loss that we had been expecting after some time of age-related unwellness, but nothing quite prepares you for the the actual loss.

You were an inspiration. Love you and will miss you, Nana.

Filed under: family

5 ways to get involved today: Ubuntu Advocacy

Tuesday, Feb 18th, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

At the Ubucon at Southern California Linux Expo on Friday, February 21st I’ll be doing a presentation on 5 ways to get involved with Ubuntu today. This post is part of a series where I’ll be outlining these ways that regular users can get involved with while only having minimal user-level experience with Ubuntu.

Back in 2007 I joined the Ubuntu Pennsylvania team and kicked off my work as a local Ubuntu advocate. Our first projects back then included an installfest in collaboration with a local recycling facility, deployment of Ubuntu systems for a girls organization and the launching of an LTSP-based project for an adult learning center.

Over the years, I’ve continued with my passion for promoting Ubuntu and its various flavors (particularly Xubuntu) through local teams, presentations and community-developed promotional materials. You can too!

LoCo Teams

Ubuntu Local Community (LoCo) teams are regionally-based groups of Ubuntu advocates and supporters who get together in order to support users in their geographical region and promote Ubuntu in their local area with groups and at conferences.

Over the years I’ve had the pleasure of participating in various events by LoCo teams. In 2009 I was invited to present at the Ubuntu Release Event in Waterloo, New York. While traveling in 2010 I got off my flight and attended the release party put on by the Ireland team for Maverick Meerkat in Dublin.

In my own teams (Pennsylvania, and now California) I’ve participated in a variety of events, including:

Training for a deployment for girls in Philadelphia (and brief impromptu chat about being a woman in tech) in 2007:

Staffing a booth at the Central Pennsylvania Open Source Convention (CPOSC) in 2009:

Staffing a booth at the outdoor community event, Solano Stroll, in Berkeley, California in 2011:

And a booth at the Southern California Linux Expo in 2013 (another one is coming up this week!):

I have really enjoyed working with LoCo teams and would like to impress upon anyone reading this: Anyone can help with a team. Teams from all over the world are listed over on http://loco.ubuntu.com/teams/ and even if your team isn’t all that active right now, you can jump right in and help out. When I began contributing to my team in Pennsylvania I’d only been using Ubuntu for a couple years on a laptop (not even on my main system!) and hadn’t really spent a lot of time in the community, within a couple of months I was not only helping organize events, but also presenting at events.

Presentations

This article is the final one in a 5 part series that I’m writing leading up to the Southern California Linux Expo where I’ll be presenting at the Ubucon. I’ve been presenting at Ubucon for the past several years on various topics from community involvement to running OpenStack on Ubuntu – and you can too!

Up on SpreadUbuntu I have uploaded my Introduction to Ubuntu talk that I frequently give at a local IT Tech class on Linux. I’ve shared it so others can take, adapt and present themselves:

http://spreadubuntu.org/en/material/presentation/introduction-ubuntu

I’m currently excited to see a colleague in the Ubuntu community is currently doing just that so he can add in a tour of Unity using this slide deck as a base.

Giving presentations at LUGs around release time or at conferences is a great way to get out there and directly talk to folks about Ubuntu. Topics are wide open, from introduction an to Ubuntu, your favorite tips about effectively using Unity or talking about the latest features that users can anticipate in the new release.

Also, giving presentations isn’t that scary. Just make sure you prepare in advance and practice, you’ll be ok :)

Promotional Material

I have pretty much no artistic talent, but back in 2010 I asked my friend Martin Owens to create a poster that I could use for an upcoming conference and he really came through with a “Reasons to Love Ubuntu” poster that I continue to use to this day, available here:

http://spreadubuntu.org/en/material/poster/reasons-love-ubuntu

This year I worked with Pierre van Male of the StartUbuntu project who developed a flyer for their project. I pulled in the artistic talents of Pasi Lallinaho of the Xubuntu team and together we created a version of the flyer that we’re using to promote Ubuntu and Xubuntu, I’ve printed out a pile of them to bring along to a conference this week:

You can download the source here:

http://spreadubuntu.org/en/material/poster/startubuntu-xubuntu-flyer-us-letter (US Letter)

http://spreadubuntu.org/en/material/poster/startubuntu-xubuntu-flyer-a4 (A4)

It’s also been translated into a few other languages, see this recent Xubuntu website post for more.

As you can see, I’m linking to SpreadUbuntu.org throughout this post. It’s a great resource for sharing posters, flyers, presentations and more between teams and I use it a lot for my own materials. Unfortunately a lot of the content is out-dated and I think the site has largely lost interest by most of the community. I’d love to see others using this resource more!

Finally, there’s the Ubuntu Advocacy Kit, a project that I’d like to see really take off. Currently it’s pretty limited in content, but with a handful of dedicated contributors it could be turned into a really valuable resource for the whole community, so if you’re interested in materials and advocacy, have a look at that project.

Previous posts in this series

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

Books, de Young, upcoming travel and Valentine’s Day

Monday, Feb 17th, 2014 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Since I’ve had over a month between trips and MJ has been working a lot, I hunkered down these past few weeks and did my best to catch up with a lot of the little stuff that slips during times of intense travel schedules. It hasn’t all been easy though, I’ve been working with my doctor to address some fatigue issues, where we’ve been seeking to tease out what is proper exhaustion (doing too much, who me?) and what is not (I want to sleep for 12 hours a day, what the heck?). There is a fair amount of both. I also decided to start week 6 of Couch-to-5K over after 5 days of rain gave me a great excuse to give it a pause. Happy to report that week 6 has now been completed, yesterday I ran, albeit slowly, for 25 minutes in a row! I’m feeling it today ;)

I’ve been catching up on my reading some too. I’ve been making my way through The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women, which has been really valuable and I’m enjoying. I’ve been challenging myself with The Revolution Starts at Home, which is a fascinating read but requires me to leave my comfort zone and listen to stories and reflections from people whose lives I don’t really understand and frequently struggle to identify with. For fun I picked up Abominable Science because I would totally be a cryptozoologist if I wasn’t such a skeptic. My magazine pile is also shrinking, I’m at least to the point where all of them are from 2014 and my brain is now full of cool science news.

During the great 5 day downpour of 2014 I didn’t stay home, as tempting as it was. On Sunday afternoon after the Sharing the Beauty architecture class (which I wrote about here), I met up with my friend Steve to finally check out the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. It’s one of the few major museums in the city I hadn’t yet been to, so in spite of the rain we made the trek across the city to visit. We skipped the special exhibition and did a tour of the whole permanent collection. I was particularly happy to see one of Edward Hicks‘ version of The Peaceable Kingdom. I’ve seen another at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and have a print of his Noah’s Ark (which I also saw in Philly) hanging in our condo. He’s one of my favorite artists, there’s something captivating about his paintings, particularly of animals.

While MJ was travelling for work this week, I also had the opportunity to have a few other meals with friends. I love working from home but I do find loneliness creeping in, particularly since events I do go to have more than a handful of people and trigger my shyness, making them exhausting. One on one meals with friends are much better, I should do more of them.

But in bigger meals, it was fun to have the San Francisco Ubuntu Hour and Bay Area Debian dinner this week. Most of the attendees were the usual suspects who I love spending time with, but at the Debian dinner we were also joined by Tollef Fog Heen who in town and able to make our discussion about the init system debate in Debian much more interesting as he is someone who was directly involved.

I mentioned earlier in the month that we’ve been working to treat Caligula’s strain of pseudomonas which has turned him into a sniffly furball. Unfortunately, while they appeared to work at first, the latest round of antibiotics were also ultimately not effective. We’ll need to follow up with the vet to see where to go from here, as Simcoe has also been sneezing. Poor critters.

In conference news, I’m spending a lot of time today prepping for SCaLE12x, which I’m flying out for on Thursday. In addition to the two talks I’m already scheduled for, I also agreed to do a third, 30 minute talk at 3:30PM on Friday on Open Source Systems Administration in the Infrastructure.Next track. I’m also happy to report that my Code Review for Systems Administrators talk at LOPSA-East was accepted! So I’ll be heading back east in early May (or late April, we’ve been discussing spending our wedding anniversary in Philly).

And so March doesn’t feel left out, my trip to Maine to visit my sister, nephew and mother is booked. I’ll be flying out on the 15th and spending a week at my sister’s place. I’ll be working while I’m there, but simply spending time with my family will be nice. Also hoping to swing by a few of my favorite places, including L.L. Bean down in Freeport.

Finally, this weekend was Valentine’s Day weekend and yesterday was the anniversary of my move to San Francisco. Unfortunately due to the bad weather on the east coast, MJ’s Thursday flight was cancelled and the first flight he had on Friday was delayed, causing him to miss his connection and ultimately not make it home until almost midnight on Valentine’s Day. He did send me roses though, which I am continuing to enjoy!

Anticipating the potential issue with making it home on time, I took to twitter and was subsequently contacted by a reporter who I had a chat with. She was working on a story about storm delays around holidays, and the result is here: Stormy Weather Again Hampering Holiday Flights. That Elizabeth Joseph is me, and we did indeed miss our fondue dinner on the first Valentine’s Day as a married couple! Fortunately we were able to get reservations at The Melting Pot last night instead and they still had their yummy Valentine’s day menu.

Filed under: books, family, health, life

5 ways to get involved today: Ubuntu Testing

Thursday, Feb 13th, 2014 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

At the Ubucon at Southern California Linux Expo on Friday, February 21st I’ll be doing a presentation on 5 ways to get involved with Ubuntu today. This post is part of a series where I’ll be outlining these ways that regular users can get involved with while only having minimal user-level experience with Ubuntu.

Interested in having a polished release but not able to contribute in a very technical way? Testing pre-releases is a great way to get started, even Mark Shuttleworth is getting in on the testing fun!

In this post, I’ll walk you through doing an ISO test, but there are also package and hardware/laptop tests that can be done, full details here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/QATracker

Testing an ISO

Log on the the testing tracker

You will want to go to http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/. The page can be a bit overwhelming at first, but there are two sections you’ll want to focus on, the log in button and the list of builds available for testing.

To log in you’ll need an account with https://login.ubuntu.com/, clicking on the “Log in” button will take you to a page where you can set up one or use your existing one.

Select a build to test

Most days the only build that is currently being tested is the “Daily” image – so in the screenshot above that is “Trusty Daily” and you’ll want to click on that link. The “Trusty Alpha2” and “Trusty Alpha1” images have already been released, so ISO testing on those is no longer necessary.

Select something to test

This screen can be a bit overwhelming too since it lists all the possible builds in the ISO tracker, which is a lot! I highly recommend using the Filters on the left hand side of the screen to select only the builds you’re interested in. In this screenshot I selected only Ubuntu and Xubuntu to make the list short.

Then you can look to see what you want to test. Do you have a new computer? You can test the 64-bit image isos, I circled where you want to click in the screenshot if you want to test the Xubuntu 64-bit ISO (I do!).

Select what test you want to do

At this next screen you will be presented with a series of tests that you can do. The easiest is “Live Session” since it doesn’t require you to install anything, it’s just testing a live session. You then also have various options for Installation-based testing.

But let’s say you have a virtual machine (Virtual Box is free and pretty easy to use for this) or a spare computer you want to do tests on, so for the purpose of this walkthrough we’ll select “Install (entire disk)” test case.

Download and prepare the ISO

Once you’re on the screen for the test case, there will be a link to downloading the ISO. There are many options for downloading, including just clicking it to download via http, downloading via rsync, zsync or torrent; you can read more about all of these options once you learn more about testing. For now, downloading it through http is fine.

While you’re waiting for it to download you can click on “Testcase” in the grey box below that to read through what you’ll be doing in the test case.

Once downloaded, either use the image directly in something like VirtualBox, or put it on a USB stick or burn a DVD.

Begin the test case

Scrolling down on the same page, you will see this:

This is where you will report the results of your test. The “Bugs to look for” are a list of bugs that others have reported that you may encounter, so you might want to look at some of those and include those bug numbers in your test if you encounter them too.

A quick rundown of the meaning of each field is as follows:

Result: Whether or not you were able to get through to the end of the test case with no fatal errors

Critical bugs: Bugs that prevented you from finishing the test case (would generally go along with “failed” above)

Bugs: Bugs that exist, but you were able to work around them and finish the test case (it can be marked as “passed” and still have bugs)

Note: Don’t stress too much over whether you believe a test is really passed or failed and whether bugs are critical or not, there is some judgement involved in here and results are reviewed by release managers who decide whether the ISO is ready for releasing. Just do your best!

Hardware profile: This is an optional field that can give the team an idea of what your hardware is. Using a virtual machine? Actual hardware? How much RAM and what type of graphics card? Put as much information as you can online somewhere and paste your link here. For example, here’s the testing profile I use for my Lenovo G575 and another for when I test in a 1.5G RAM virtual box instance. You can also choose to use the “hardinfo” command to generate information about your hardware and put it online somewhere.

Comment: You can add any additional comments you may have about doing the test case

If you run into any bugs while doing your test, you will need to submit those bugs for them to be recorded. For this you will need an account on launchpad.net, if you don’t have one, get one by clicking here. Once you submit a bug you’ll want to add that bug number to your list of Bugs (or Critical Bugs). Learn more about reporting bugs here.

Note: Reporting bugs can be hard, particularly determining what package to file them against, even I still struggle with this! My recommendation is to do your best, make sure you add your bug to the tracker so people notice it and ask for help on the ubuntu-quality mailing list if you’re really unsure.

Done

Click “Submit Result” and you’ll be finished reporting a test case! The Ubuntu community thanks you :)

Learn more about testing

A more thorough walkthrough with more screenshots can be found here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/ISO/Walkthrough

You can sign up for and email the ubuntu-quality mailing list to introduce yourself and ask any questions you may have, they’re a friendly bunch.

Visit the Quality Assurance Team wiki for more about other kinds of testing.

Previous posts in this series

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet
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