Test events coming up: Fedora 13 Alpha test compose

It seems early as always, but we're just about to start up the Fedora 13 Testing Machine, which will roll on right up to the final release in May. The Alpha release is due early next month, and this week we start off by testing the first Alpha 'test compose', which will arrive on Thursday 2010-02-11. We have some changes to the validation testing we'll be doing for all pre-releases and pre-release candidates this time around. The installation validation testing hasn't changed greatly, but the test cases have been slightly reorganized to reflect the new release criteria, and also general changes in the Fedora world since the list was drawn up. A few have been removed and the test priorities have been reorganized to be based on the release for which the test must pass (Alpha, Beta or Final). A bigger change is the introduction of desktop validation testing. As part of the new release criteria, we added some criteria which are not based on installation but on the functioning of the installed system. We've gathered up most of these into desktop validation testing, which will take place alongside installation validation testing. So alongside the installation validation testing results page for the test compose, there's now a desktop validation testing results page. You can see the list of tests that will be performed there, and there will be a similar page created for each testing stage before the final release of Fedora 13. Columns are included for all major desktops, but only the default desktop results (GNOME) are able to block the releases, for now. For more information on Fedora QA in general, see the QA page and the Joining QA page. If you have any questions about this testing, please contact the QA mailing list. I'm hoping this testing goes well and helps us ensure that future releases have a desktop that works on a basic level out of the box. Please do pitch in and contribute tests to fill out the results page! I'd especially love to see results from all the non-default desktops in the matrix, KDE / Xfce / LXDE folks ;)