Community Website: Moderation and ISO testing modules

Two new modules were implemented for the community website: moderation and ISO testing.

The moderation module

This module was developed in an effort to avoid spamming. It gives extended permissions to moderators, who can now delete ideas, tutorials and other things on the website. General rules, moderators and their activity are published at the following address:

http://community.linuxmint.com/user/moderators

The ISO testing module

This module was developed in an effort to improve the process of testing ISO images. Because of the way we used to work:

  • It was hard for people to follow our progress
  • It was hard for us to modify and improve our test cases
  • It was taking too long for our editions to be tested

I’m setting up a new team of testers, visible here:

http://community.linuxmint.com/iso/team

Once all test cases are tested by at least one of them, I verify each test and approve the ISO for a public release. Compared to the past, this means an ISO will be tested by more people, and only require the approval of one person instead of two.

The progress of our testing is now also visible to everyone at the following address:

http://community.linuxmint.com/iso

We’re still dedicated to keep ISOs private until we’re fully happy with their quality. Ideally, I’d like to get to a stage where we have a large team of testers (between 20 and 30) who are 100% reliable, available most of the time and who fully understand the way we work. We need to be fast, but we also don’t want to lessen the quality of our testing by making it public. First, this would create a load on our development server that it could not handle, second, this would result in us getting too many reports and being unable to communicate on a one to one basis with testers to improve the way they understand our test cases, third, this would open the door to people distributing Linux Mint ISOs of bad quality and using them on their computers… and after all the efforts put into testing our system, we’d really would not like this to happen.

We’re committed to quality. In comparison, delays and deadlines have no importance. This new module will let you monitor our progress while we’re working on improving this quality.

Boo’s Mint 9 KDE i386 build #22 ISO is the first one to be tested using this new module. Ikey’s first Debian edition ISO could be next…

25 comments

  1. Cheers for this Clem,

    Transparency Rules.
    Good to know who can, who is, and who to thank for the ISO testing.

  2. The testing module idea is pure genius.

    Not only does it show what is going on minute by minute, but also gets us impatient folks off your backs.

  3. I hope that mint’s debian edition would fix a problem concerning b43-pci-bridge on my compaq mini 311 that i find in all debian based(except ubuntu 10.04 and mint9, why??).

  4. Excited about the Debian Remix.. if it goes well I think maybe we should consider switching over for good, like Crunchbang has.

  5. if there is anything I could help with on the testing… I would be happy to. I have become a huge fan of Linux Mint and Ubuntu, would love to do something to help!

  6. they should release the rc of linux mint 9 kde then release the final version when mint 4 win is fixed

  7. Hey PhrostByte (i assume my friend from fatwallet forums with same handle…i know he runs linux mint also…lol)…yes, i agree also… i do hope the Debian remix works out well and that they will consider switching over from Ubuntu to Debian…this could be a good way to test it out and see if it will work out well…

  8. The new review processes should help the excellent ‘only release when ready’ policy.
    If you want to further reduce ‘not being able to see the forest for the trees’ difficulties as enjoyed by current source Ubuntu, you might consider introducing a similar review and pruning process for LinuxMint Bug reporting in Launchpad ?
    Any scheme that also includes getting the originator of a wild idea to ‘sign off’ as part of the deletion can lead to more constructive ideas.

  9. since there is a lot of discussion on changing over to debian as a base, i remember that OpenGEU made that change, but they put a lot of stress on the fact that they are keeping the ubuntu repos for installing software,i think switching to debian could be a good idea as long as we use the ubuntu repos as well.

  10. Hello, I just installed Mint 9 yesterday over my existing ubuntu 8.04 distro. I have been trying to get registered at the mint forum with no luck. I’ve never gotten the activation email, I went back and requested it several times but still haven’t gotten it. I was just wondering if there was anybody over here that could help me out. There’s no spam filter on my email client, so I know that’s not the problem.

  11. @baffle-boy
    that was the Linux Mint Team’s intention, they’re not going to change to Debian with the main version and retain the Ubuntu base/repos, there has been a few posts around about not dropping Ubuntu unless forcibly done so.
    However there has been elusive few posts hinting an Edition, branch or flavour of Mint (like how KDE/Gnome/LXDE/XFCE/Fluxbox) with Debian base.

  12. I would like to see a Debian version, and maybe go that direction in the future for the main release as I am not happy with the changes that Ubuntu keeps surprising us with. You never know what they will do next. And, I certainly don’t want a cloud only type of distribution either such as the upcoming Google OS. They can’t keep their igoogle and gmail servers working reliably now, and neither can Facebook. I don’t want all my stuff lost in the cloud with no access during their down times. Also, I want to choose what applications I run, not them.

  13. I would like to contribute to testing so it would be great if a how-to or team guideline were made available.
    For eg. My bone of contention with ubuntu 10.04 was that the lower panel in their default desktop would crash whenever I right-clicked on the desktop switcher to reduce th number of virtual desktops.
    I always felt apprehensions regarding reporting ubuntu’s problems since they pride themselves a little too much on usability.
    I feel the linux mint community has it’s head in the right place thus my earnest support.

  14. I’d love to be an ISO tester. I have several ISOs I test in Virtualbox, as well as installing Linux ISOs to bootable USB for testing and installation.

    Write me at pixelheart.facepunch@live.com

    Or send me a PM on http://www.facepunch.com to username: Pixel Heart
    (caps and space needed)

    I’m dedicated to help the Mint community, making sure Mint (in any desktop environment and distro) is working properly and 100% stable.

    Drop me a line. pixelheart.facepunch@live.com is also my Windows Live Messenger account, so feel free to message me there as well. (I use emesene.)

  15. Help…

    I cant make the printer working. Canon Pixma ip1800

    Install jaunty kript_canon, and no print jaunty.tar.gz

    install the drive, but no print page one

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