How to get involved in the testing team?

[tlmcca]

I just purchased a Dell Latitude E6420 laptop on eBay from a seller who ships with Mint 18.3 installed and expect delivery by Apr 9. I chose this model even though the Hardware DB doesn't list a status for 18.3 but does show it worked perfectly with older releases. That and the seller's guarantee made it worthwhile.

I've gained a lot from reading this forum and I'd like to give back by providing an addition to the DB for this device. My questions:

• 1. Does the testing team accept new members?
  2. Is there a testing script that is used to make sure each device is scored on the same basis?
  3. How do I get started?

Thanks,
Terry

[xenopeek]

You don't need to join the testing team to write a hardware review. Or am I misunderstanding your intent? The testing team does the quality assurance tests on new ISOs before they are released for beta testing. Those tests are specific and about the ISO itself; they are not about hardware compatibility or issues. If you click on any of the ISOs here https://community.linuxmint.com/iso you can view the test cases that the QA testing team does.

So if you just want to write a hardware review for how well a specific Linux Mint version works with your laptop, you just need to register an account on the Community website and then on its My Places > My Hardware menu you can click the button to write a new hardware review.

[tlmcca]

What I am looking for is to provide an update to the Hardware Database which I assumed would require some sort of structured testing.

Terry

[xenopeek]

No, anybody can write a review for the hardware database. You can do it as detailed as you want to. Simple things like what did you test on the laptop, what worked (and possibly what did you need to do to make it work) and what didn't. What didn't you test. Things like cards readers, USB ports, wifi, ethernet, touchpad, can you suspend and so on.

[tlmcca]

Are those details from previous reviews available?

Terry

[xenopeek]

https://community.linuxmint.com/hardware/welcome

[tlmcca]

Okay, I received my E6420 this morning and installed 18.3 Cinnamon and that went very well. I worked through testing everything I was able to do and registered on the community.linuxmint.com site to share what I found. I completed the New hardware device form and when I click Save this hardware device I get an Access Denied message:

Block details:
Your IP: <removed>
URL: community.linuxmint.com/hardware/save
Your Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/65.0.3325.181 Safari/537.36
Block ID: EXPVP5
Block reason: Exploit attempt denied by virtual patching.
Time: Sun Apr 8 01:52:35 2018
Server ID: 14009

I've saved the text I typed into the form so I'll be able to enter it again if someone can tell me what the problem is.

Terry