Hi all,
I am interested in helping out with testing for Fedora. I have been using Linux on and off since the late 90s, I played around a bit with Red Hat and Debian in the 90s but never got far though. I have been using Ubuntu on and off since the mid 2000s, spent a couple of years using Arch Linux as my main OS in the late 2000s, but I got sick of fixing things constantly so I went back to Windows. I did start using Ubuntu Gnome as my main OS about 2 years ago but I very recently (this week!) installed Fedora 24 and will use that as my main OS. The reason I changed is because I felt I would learn more about Linux in general by using Fedora and also I liked the security aspects of Fedora over Ubuntu.
I consider myself a Windows power user but still a beginner to intermediate Linux user. I just finished the Linux Foundation Linux 101 course on edX and I would like to continue learning more about Fedora and Linux in general and I figured doing software testing is a good start. I have done some software testing before through work, mainly supporting developers and testers as an ICT Business Analyst but I have also written and executed test cases. I do work full time in ICT doing data extraction and manipulation with SQL and Regex. I am also doing a computer science degree part time, which I am about a third of the way through. I haven't done much programming yet in the degree but in about 6 months I will be doing a lot of programming.
Unfortunately because of my current commitments I don't have a great deal of time but I feel I can definitely allocate 30 minutes a day 7 days a week to Fedora software testing. My IRC nick is blindcant, but I just have to configure Weechat before joining the IRC channel. I would eventually like to help out the Fedora Project by writing documentation and also contributing code, but my knowledge isn't good enough on Fedora or Linux or programming to do that just yet, so again, I think software testing is a great place to start. I am looking forward to working and communicating with you all.
Dallas aka blindcant.
On Wed, 2016-08-24 at 17:38 +1000, blind cant wrote:
Hi all,
I am interested in helping out with testing for Fedora. I have been using Linux on and off since the late 90s, I played around a bit with Red Hat and Debian in the 90s but never got far though. I have been using Ubuntu on and off since the mid 2000s, spent a couple of years using Arch Linux as my main OS in the late 2000s, but I got sick of fixing things constantly so I went back to Windows. I did start using Ubuntu Gnome as my main OS about 2 years ago but I very recently (this week!) installed Fedora 24 and will use that as my main OS. The reason I changed is because I felt I would learn more about Linux in general by using Fedora and also I liked the security aspects of Fedora over Ubuntu.
I consider myself a Windows power user but still a beginner to intermediate Linux user. I just finished the Linux Foundation Linux 101 course on edX and I would like to continue learning more about Fedora and Linux in general and I figured doing software testing is a good start. I have done some software testing before through work, mainly supporting developers and testers as an ICT Business Analyst but I have also written and executed test cases. I do work full time in ICT doing data extraction and manipulation with SQL and Regex. I am also doing a computer science degree part time, which I am about a third of the way through. I haven't done much programming yet in the degree but in about 6 months I will be doing a lot of programming.
Unfortunately because of my current commitments I don't have a great deal of time but I feel I can definitely allocate 30 minutes a day 7 days a week to Fedora software testing. My IRC nick is blindcant, but I just have to configure Weechat before joining the IRC channel. I would eventually like to help out the Fedora Project by writing documentation and also contributing code, but my knowledge isn't good enough on Fedora or Linux or programming to do that just yet, so again, I think software testing is a great place to start. I am looking forward to working and communicating with you all.
Welcome Dallas, thanks for volunteering! Glad to have you along. Just one thing I'd suggest: one of the best ways to learn things is by doing them. If you're interested in improving your coding skills, one of the best ways to learn is to go beyond just finding bugs and filing them. When you find a bug, see if you can do anything to figure out why it's happening, and if you can, see if you can fix it. This will be hard at first, but the more you try, the easier it'll get, and there's no penalty for failing.
If you try this for a bug but can't figure it out, a good thing to do is follow the bug and if it gets fixed, find the fix (you can usually follow the information in the bug report, the update, or the package changelog to find it - if not, you can ask the maintainer), and examine it and try to figure out how it fixes the bug and why the developer chose to fix it in that way. This is a pretty good way to learn about how bugs get fixed and how development works.
Good luck! :)
Hey Adam,
Thanks for the sponsorship and advice. The bug tracking concept sounds good and I will check out some bugs on Bugzilla. Also, I will start setting up my testing environment this week and get myself acquainted with the tools everyone uses. I am planning to use a VM for testing as I don't have a spare physical machine. Is there any particular programming language that is used the most with Fedora? I would assume C but I thought I should ask to be sure.
On Sun, 2016-08-28 at 01:15 +0000, Dallas Dallas wrote:
Hey Adam,
Thanks for the sponsorship and advice. The bug tracking concept sounds good and I will check out some bugs on Bugzilla. Also, I will start setting up my testing environment this week and get myself acquainted with the tools everyone uses. I am planning to use a VM for testing as I don't have a spare physical machine. Is there any particular programming language that is used the most with Fedora? I would assume C but I thought I should ask to be sure.
Well, the software in the distribution is written in all kinds of languages, of course. The most common language used for things actually written as part of the Fedora project itself is probably Python; most of QA's tools are in Python, as are most of the packaging-related tools.
My personal take - as someone who had no coding background at all - is that the language isn't always the most important thing; there are actually a lot of commonalities between well-run projects no matter what language they're written in, and I tend to find the general process of figuring out why something goes wrong and how to make it stop going wrong is more about understanding those processes, and various different conventions between different projects and types of project, than particularly to do with the language that's used. You'll often find you can broadly understand what's going on with a bug without any formal grounding in the language at all. Just my perspective, though! Good luck again :)
On Sunday, August 28, 2016, Dallas Dallas blindcant@gmail.com wrote:
Awesome sounds good, thanks again :)
Just a friendly note your name associated with your email address seems incorrect based on your self introduction...
Thanks for pointing that out, it was correct initially and I am not sure why it changed. Anyway I changed it back now.
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Adam Williamson -
Christopher Meng -
Dallas Hall