After using the new Mint Community website for testing, with some new tests too, the last development ISO still had some minor bugs. Two were easy to fix, but the other two KDE ones have been a real pain. Well lets say they are very easy for a user to configure using system settings if you know where to look but to have them enabled by default is…. well… I gave up. KDE 4.4 now has new ways to generate the configs it wants after putting your configs there first. I’m sure it is just a bug, but it can wait till nest time.
I am uploading a new ISO to test via the Mint Community website testers.

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…

Clem found a couple of bugs in the last dev-ISO. One was a plymouth text theme bug and another was a mint4win (Wubi) bug. The mint4win bug is the one causing issues. Do we leave it for now, fix it now or remove it? Clem is working on mint4win to find a fix. I have build a new ISO but it includes the broken mint4win, but I will wait for direction from Clem before uploading it or another version for developer testing.
With the amount of testing growing due to more Linux Mint versions and more pre-defined tests, Clem is talking about including 10 more testers in the developer team to speed up testing and reliability. This will not happen until the next Linux Mint release and the details of how or who will be chosen has not been decided yet. I am sure Clem will post more details about this in the not too distant future.