Sound / PulseAudio Test Day on Wednesday 2009-09-16

So after the excitement of last week's X.org Test Week, we have another big ticket Test Day coming up on Wednesday: sound Test Day. We will be doing some broad-based tests to try and make sure that typical audio use works properly on as wide as possible a range of hardware in Fedora 12. And yes, the Test Day includes PulseAudio. Here's your chance to test out whether the current Fedora 12 code and PulseAudio work properly with your sound card, and complain - appropriately, of course! - if they don't. As usual, we will be providing live images for testing, so you'll be able to test without installing anything permanently or affecting your regular Fedora (or other operating system!) at all. Testing will be very easy, just a case of booting the live image and testing a few simple sound-related operations. Just testing whether sound works at all out of the box will be very helpful. So please come along on Wednesday and help us test! Even if you can't make it on Wednesday, it will be very useful if you can run the tests and provide your feedback in the results table, either before or after the Test Day happens. The Test Day itself will be taking place all day in #fedora-test-day on Freenode IRC. If you're not sure how to use IRC, see this guide.

As with the graphics events, this Test Day may well be of interest to those outside the Fedora community as well: all distributions use much the same set of sound drivers, and most use PulseAudio these days, so identifying and fixing problems in Fedora Rawhide is very likely to help out other distributions too. Fedora Rawhide has the very latest PulseAudio code, so if you come along and help us test, you'll help make sure that code is nice and polished when it lands in your distribution of choice.

Please note that the wiki page isn't finalized yet; it's obviously missing the live images (which I haven't yet generated) and the test cases. These should appear tomorrow, but I wanted to get the word out about the event as soon as possible.

I'd like to say a big thanks to Lennart Poettering for being very positive about the idea of doing a Test Day, and getting involved with the organization. He'll be present on IRC for the Test Day, too (his IRC nickname is 'mezcalero'). Please don't use this as a venue for broad, unhelpful complaints or flames about PulseAudio: we're genuinely interested in fixing any specific issues that arise in PA as a result of the Test Day, but flamewars about its intrinsic value will only clutter up the channel, annoy everyone involved, and waste time. Thanks!