According to this posting to the fedora-test-list by Liam, there’s going to be some installation testing for the Fedora 12 (Constantine) Alpha candidate next week, on Wednesday July 29. This is a chance to shake out some of the new features in the Anaconda installation application that have come in over the past couple of months. The more testing we can get on the installer early, the more bulletproof we can make it for our final release by the time code is frozen in the fall.
I find that the easiest way to do installation testing is to maintain a local Rawhide mirror — a copy of the Rawhide repository on a machine on my home network, shared out via the Web. But there are complete instructions on the wiki for the many ways you can test Rawhide, specifically a section on doing a direct daily installation. You don’t even have to have a local mirror. You can download a small-ish boot.iso image for either 32-bit or 64-bit architecture, and install directly from the Internet if you have a broadband connection.
It’s easy to get involved in testing, and there’s even a matrix of results that we’ll be filling out on July 29 to see what works, and what needs work. This is a great opportunity for anyone to become a contributor to Fedora by helping with Anaconda, which is used not just in Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but also in CentOS, Scientific Linux, and many other derived distributions. See you on the 29th for an awesome installer validation day!
It’s probably worth noting that right now installation is fairly heavily broken. //bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=510033 breaks either the majority of installs or just _all_ installs, and //bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=513020 isn’t much of a picnic either. So don’t expect a fun time if you try installing current Rawhide right now 🙂