Test Day:2009-08-11 Fit and Finish:Peripherals

What to test?
Today's instalment of Fedora Test Day will focus on user experience issues of peripherals. We are interesting in the problems you face when plugging anything into your computer, be it a mouse, a keyboard an external hard drive, a modem, a printer, a camera, a phone, a music player, a GPS or whatever.

Who's available
The following cast of characters will be available for testing, workarounds, bug fixes, and general discussion: Matthias Clasen,  David Zeuthen,  Bastien Nocera

Prerequisites for Test Day

 * An up-to-date rawhide installation. See the instructions on the Rawhide page on the various ways in which you can install or update to Rawhide. If that feels too risky to you, we also have recent rawhide live images available that allow you to participate without risking your existing installation. Tips on using a live image are available at FedoraLiveCD.

Note that the images will be removed shortly after the test day, since they are strictly for test day usage only. Warning: I was bit by the bug having to do with notification area icons not showing up. I killed nm-applet and ran it directly to get onto my wireless network.


 * For the Go online with a phone test, you'll need the latest versions of NetworkManager and gnome-bluetooth
 * A variety of gizmos that can be plugged into a computer. See above for a representative list of devices that might be good to test
 * A good mood. Remember; while we are poking into things that may make us angry or frustrated, we are doing it to make things better

How to test
In this test day, we want to find small and large issues that ruin the user experience of working with devices that can be (hot-)plugged into your computer.

Test cases:
 * Transfer music to a music player
 * Get photos off a camera
 * Transfer files to a phone
 * Go online with a phone via Bluetooth, Go online with a phone (wired)
 * Copy data onto a USB stick
 * Setting up Bluetooth printers

Here are some things to look at:
 * Does the desktop react in the right way if you plug in your device ?
 * Is a suitable icon used to represent the device ?
 * Do the relevant applications 'see' the device, e.g. does a music player appear in rhythmbox ?
 * Do applications react appropriately to the device being unplugged ?
 * Do things work in the same way if the device is already plugged in before boot or before login ?