Some testing

[Jonathan Carter]

Hi

This is some testing using Edubuntu 6.10 pre-release daily build server
CD 17/10. I will do additional testing after an rsync tomorrow morning.
Please note that I'm a bit tired and haven't proofread any of this, so
apologies if something doesn't make sense!

1. Installer warns that it could not use a network card for dhcpd, and
that it should be manually edited. I think this is a result of my pc
getting an ip address from the network that isn't in the default
settings range. I think it's a bit strange that a server install seeks a
dhcp address. I think that it would be better to ask the user if they'd
like to run a dhcp client or not, even though we'd ideally like as few
questions as possible.

2. The 'Education' menu has lost it's icon.

3. All sofware under Education menu has been opened and run as expected.
The new Kanagram and KTouch are much nicer than the old ones :)

4. Under games, Gcompris crashes horribly, it even logs me out of my
gnome-session. I've asked in #edubuntu for testing of newer edgy builds,
and it is reported to work fine by one person who is running a more
updated version of edgy. Output of running gcompris >& in a terminal
just before it closes my session:
""" """

All other games work fine. GCompris administration also runs fine.

As a side-note, after the last GCompris crash, my gnome desktop
wallpaper is missing, and right-clicking on the desktop doesn't produce
any results. After more testing, this seem to happen after some of the
gcompris crashes, and sometimes not. Another user experienced the same
problem as I:
"22:07 <tideline> highvoltage, I installed gcompris, when I run it I get
logged out - pretty         much the same as you" Another user with a
completely updated system reports it runs fine: "22:11 < pygi>
highvoltage: confirming all works marvelous". Tideline last updated this
mornign, pygi has a freshly updated system.


5. Under the Graphics menu, all software opens and work as expected.

6. Under the Internet menu, everything works fine except Evolution. When
I open Evolution I get a message that an unknown CORBA exception has
occured (IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0) (I think that the omg error
is a but funny). It warns that I might loose some of my old data, but
this is the first time that evolution is run on this fresh system. The
firefox homepage contains the correct version, and all the data is still
correct and relevant. 

7. Under Office, we see Evolution again. Is it intentional to have
Evolution under two different menu items? Scribus also appears here
again, it's already in Graphics. Besides that everything in Office works
as expected.

8. Under Sound and Video, everything runs as expected.

9. In add/remove programs, they have fixed the 'Commercial Software'
button (it isn't Edubuntu-specific, but it deserves special mention,
since it was my #2 biggest problem with dapper- hooray!)

10. Everything under the Places menu work as expected.

11. Under System -> Preferences, everything works as expected, I haven't
tested power management though. The screensaver seems to be enabled, I
will check if this is the case with thin clients too later.

12. Everything under System -> Administration works as expected.
Although, d-i is clever enough to disallow you to use admin as a
username, while the Users and Groups tool does allow you. I think it
would be good to change the tool to disallow admin creation too, but
that's a bug and one for Feisty.

13. Under the other System settings, things work more or less ok, except
that About Ubuntu takes us to the standard about Ubuntu page, where
there's no mention of Edubuntu.

14. So that was the boring part, now to LTSP... I simply set my IP
address to be in the 192.168.0.0 network and dhcpd started fine. I
see /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf is still installed, some users might find it
confusing having two dhcpd.conf's. We might have to highlight that the
dhcpd.conf file is in /etc/ltsp

15. Fired up a thin client, PXE works fine, haven't tested etherboot
yet. Usplash disappears for less than a second displaying an error about
udev: "udevd-event[1732]: run_program:  /dev/null failed, no such file
or directory". I had to reboot the client multiple times to get the full
error down, about once every three reboots, it didn't show the message.

As a side-note, the server's disk seems to work quite hard with even one
client booting. It might be beneficial in future versions of LTSP to
make some tweaks so that the NFS disk reads will be cached in RAM more
aggresively.

16. Attempted logging in as my first user, I was kicked back to LDM, I
suspect that I still have to run ltsp-update-sshkeys after changing my
IP address, although I thought for some reason that this is not
necassary anymore.

17. When logging in for the first time, the sound just worked, great!
But I was presented immediately with a bug reporting tool, it found a
problem in /usr/libexec/evolution-alarm-notify. It might be caused by me
still being logged in at the server (oops). Runnign Gcompris on the thin
client works fine though. Further on everything worked as it worked on
the server. 

18. Added the user to the 'fuse' group, and logged out and back in, and
inserted a usb flash disk. The device was on my desktop, but when I
double-clicked on it, nothing happened and the desktop became
non-responsive. In the meantime, I opened up OpenOffice.org and tried to
save a piece of text on the usb flash disk. When selecting the disk, OOo
also became unresponsive, and after a minute or so, it suddenly worked
fine. I removed the flash disk, and the files saved from the thin client
read fine. Some users might be confused that there is no 'safe removal
option'. Perhaps one would have been nice just as a placebo effect :)

19. It's great to see a defualt lts.conf file, but it would be nice to
see some examples in it.

20. LTSP in Ubuntu 6.10 looks great. It feels much, much more mature
than it did in the last two releases. I'm very happy with it, although
LDM could do with a nicer Edubuntu theme, and it could be a little more
'friendly' too.

21. I'm not sure that the session manager in LDM works as expected, the
choices it currently gives me is: Default, gnome-session and metacity.
Choosing metacity doesn't work. I will test this more thoroughly
tomorrow (after installing fluxbox or xfce on the server)

22. After changing the language, I could not log in anymore, I just got
kicked back to LDM. I will also test this more thoroughly tomorrow.

More information and updates on some of the issues will be available
tomorrow. Overall, Edubuntu has matured a lot in this release, mostly
due to improvements in LTSP. If I haven't managed to break my LTSP
already, I could send some more information on memory usage on the thin
client. Although I can confirm that swap over NBD works out of the box.
Wow :)

-Jonathan