The last few days I have spent at work here at the University of Oslo testing if the new batch of computers will work with Linux. Every year for the last few years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand computers, and this year HP won the bid. Two different desktops and five different laptops are on the list this year. We in the UNIX group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the university.
My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well. To test, I PXE install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware. When something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move on. If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely have the time to do this for all the problems I find.
Anyway, to get to the point of this post. Here is the simple tests I perform on a new model.
- Is PXE installation working? I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment. If I feel like it, I also test with RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.
- Is X.org working? If the graphical login screen show up after installation, X.org is working.
- Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working? Running glxgears (in package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second reported by the program.
- Is sound working? With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful. If there are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound. I normally test this by playing a HTML5 video in Firefox/Iceweasel.
- Is the USB subsystem working? I test this by plugging in a USB memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.
- Is the CD/DVD player working? I test this by inserting any CD/DVD I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.
- Is any built in camera working? Test using cheese, and see if a picture from the v4l device show up.
- Is bluetooth working? Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if any bluetooth devices are discovered. In my office, I normally see a few.
- For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working. I have memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE notice this.
- For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working? I'm testing if the special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after resume.
- For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level, adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output, switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc? The set of buttons differ from laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are not.
- Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers, acceleration sensors etc. I rarely test these, as I do not know how to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their existence.
By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are for the HP machines I am testing. I'm not done yet, so I will report the test results later. For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid, and audio fail on RHEL6. Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p. As you can see, I have most machines left to test. One interesting observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than RHEL6 with glxgears. No idea why.