Monday, November 30, 2009

Lots Of QA Work And Testing

As December begins I have been reviewing my workload and the next 30 days is going to be busy with QA and software testing of several software packages. I have finished the next thin client OS upgrade and it's now in the hands of our Support division who will schedule it for deployment to our 550 devices.

My projects at this time, in no order:

Firefox 3.6 & Flash 10.1: Adobe labs released 10.1 and I have integrated it into Firefox 3.6 for testing. So far both products seem to be working. I'm also checking into the proxy and bandwidth issues for the Personas. Cool bling, but lots of traffic for hundreds of users to be hovering their pointers over the images and trying them out.

Evolution On SLED 11: We are waiting for integration of patches and official RPM to try and reach a milestone that will allow the rest of our users to be moved to this new version. About 190 people out of 750 are using the new version.

OpenOffice 3.2: It's getting pretty close and several features that users have requested are available in this new release. It also includes a feature in Impress that we bountied. I developed a new python/Glade GUI that pops open the first time you launch 3.2 announcing the new features.

Tomboy on SLED 11: We haven't upgraded Tomboy in a while, and I hope to soon install Tomboy on SLED 11 and get that deployed to our users to replace the current SLED 10 version.

Compiz & gnome-shell: Our current GNOME desktop servers are starting to get a bit old and I'm opening a new project to begin the process of moving to something newer. It probably will be OpenSuse 11.2. This would take many months, and probably would go live in the next 4-6 months. It looks like we will use compiz for one more iteration of the desktop and then explore gnome-shell on the next major upgrade around 2012. Gnome-shell is not yet optimized and tested for remote display and won't be ready in time. I'm going to check on the status of the C++ port and make a decision about which version to try and deploy.

ZeitGeist: I have promised to check out this technology for enterprise use, and will be doing that in the coming weeks. I have to consider how it integrates with Tracker, how to replace or compliment the features we have in Beagle, how to run this via cron jobs and not hammer drives during business hours. I also have to experiment with NFS mounting the data stores that Zeitgeist is mining, they aren't all on the same physical computers.

Thin Client DVD Support: I have been thinking about possibly loading a software DVD player on the thin clients for users that have permissions to mount DVDs. Increasingly they are receiving training and demo videos on DVD media. Lots to consider with this move, how to stop them from playing "_Dumb and Dumber_" ? :)

Lots to do, and always fun. My thanks to everyone that works on these technologies, you do the hard work!

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

DVDs seem easily enough handled: don't install libdvdcss, and they won't successfully play most movies (which use CSS), but they can play most random demo/training/burned DVDs (which usually don't).

Johan Dahlin said...

gnome-shell C++ port? Sure you don't mean tomboy?

John said...

@Johan: I think he refers to the 0.9 version of compiz, which was rewritten in c++

Dave Richards said...

johan: Yup, Compiz was re-written in C++, so I'll have to spend some time testing all of the new code.

Arnie Shore said...

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On SourceForge at http://openises.sourceforge.net/tickets01.html

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