Fedora is looking for a few good testers.
The developers at Fedora are in the final stages of integrating Linux kernel 6.3 (just released last week) into Fedora, and they need interested Fedora users to help with some testing if they can. For those that are interested, the project has organized what it calls a “test week,” which will run from Sunday May 7 through Sunday May 14. If you’re a casual user who never works in a command line, this isn’t for you, but if you know your way around Linux — and you’re a Fedora user — this might be a way for you to do some good old-fashioned payback to the devs behind your Linux distribution of choice.
In case you’re wondering, test weeks (and test days) have long been Fedora’s way of getting help from the distro’s user community to test new software to see how it performs on a variety of hardware configurations in order to find hardware conflicts and other bugs so they can be fixed before the changes are merged into Fedora’s mainstream release. The process is a little geeky, but I figure that most readers of FOSS Force can handle it.
Basically, you’ll be downloading and installing the new kernel on an instance of the latest and greatest version of Fedora that’s running either on bare metal or as a virtual machine (but not on an instance you’re using in production, in case the test goes south in a system destroying way). After that, you’ll run some tests prescribed by the distro’s software engineers.
It looks pretty easy. The Fedora folks have it all laid out in a wiki which explains the steps for downloading and installing the kernel, as well as information on how to run the tests and report the results.
“Happy testing!” Fedora says.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
