It's been a busy week in the land of Fedora QA. Last week Beta release for F20 slipped by a week - which meant this week was full of testing needing to be done by Thursday. Thursday was the Go/No-Go meeting where QA and Release Engineering decide if the latest release candidate (RC) is ready for it's milestone release (in this case, Beta).

While that seems pretty simple - the latest RC for Beta dropped Wednesday night. So there were a lot of things to test before the Thursday meeting. Wednesday night was a late night due to this - with several of us staying up well into the night (or getting up extra early in the morning). RC5 (what will be released for Beta) only had a few updates to fix blocker bugs, so we were able to migrate a several sets of test cases over from previous testing runs - which lightened the load a lot.

In the end we were able to get a "Go" for the upcoming Beta release without having to slip again. If we'd have slipped again it would have pushed final release into Christmas - and nobody wants to be busy hitting a deadline right before or on Christmas.

Exploring Window Managers

In other news, I've been exploring window managers. Gnome (default for Fedora) is all well and good, but I am really trying to get away from the mouse. Being able to do everything with just a keyboard is great. That's one of the reasons I use pentadactyl for Firefox - less need for a mouse == a better browsing experience.

With this in mind, I went looking for a tiling window manager. The first thing I tried was xmonad

xmonad

Stealing the description from their site:

xmonad is a dynamically tiling X11 window manager that is written and configured in Haskell. In a normal WM, you spend half your time aligning and searching for windows. xmonad makes work easier, by automating this.

Xmonad does exactly what it advertises. It's easily installed with yum (and I presume apt-get). The thing that wasn't easy - at least for me - was configuration. It's all in Haskell, which I don't have an iota of experience with.

I futzed around with using/configuring xmonad for about 2 days. It definitely has a learning curve - similar to emacs, I felt. I didn't feel like learning Haskell, so I started looking for something else.

i3

I found the i3 when looking for an alternative to xmonad. i3 is one of the more popular tiling window managers. It's written in C and the configuration is pretty straight-forward. The documentation is great and there are tons of plug-ins.

After reading the user's guide I felt like I had a decent understanding on how things work within i3. I was able to get my status bar working on i3bar with minimal effort. i3 is the tiling window manager I decided to go with - and have been using it for the past week or so.

If you're looking to broaden your experience with window managers, take a look at i3. It's a bit of a shift from your traditional desktop environment but it's a good shift.

Until later.

// Roshi