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Fedora Media Writer
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Date 2020-09-18
Time all day

Website QA/Test Days
IRC #fedora-test-day (webirc)
Mailing list test


Note.png
Can't make the date?
If you come to this page before or after the test day is completed, your testing is still valuable, and you can use the information on this page to test, file any bugs you find at Bugzilla, and add your results to the results section. If this page is more than a month old when you arrive here, please check the current schedule and see if a similar but more recent Test Day is planned or has already happened.

What to test?[edit]

Today's instalment of Fedora Test Day will focus on Fedora Media Writer. Fedora Media Writer, is used for creating bootable flash drives on different operating systems and architectures. The tool is the primary download option for Fedora Workstation since Fedora 25. Since the Fedora 26 cycle, support for writing ARM images has been added to Media Writer. In this test day, we aim to test the creation of Fedora 33 pre-release boot media on Windows, macOS, and various Fedora releases, with a focus on creation of ARM-bootable media.

Who's available[edit]

The following cast of characters will be available testing, workarounds, bug fixes, and general discussion. In case of problem related to test day organization/wiki/whatever, please reach out to sumantrom.

Prerequisite for Test Day[edit]

Warning.png
Data loss
Any data on the USB stick or memory card used for this test is likely to be destroyed. Please do not use a stick whose contents you need to keep.
  • USB flash drive or (micro)SD card for ARM testing (min. 4GiB)
  • Root access on the system used to write the drive (or admin access in Windows)
  • The latest version of the tool for one of the test platforms (see next section)
  • A system to test booting on (for testing ARM images, you will need a supported ARM system)

Getting the latest version[edit]

The minimum required Fedora Media Writer version for testing during the test day is 4.1.6.

You can verify which version you have either by checking your packaging system or by unrolling the title screen and scrolling to the bottom.

How to update?[edit]

There are three ways to get the latest version in Fedora:

  • From the Fedora repositories
    • On Fedora 32 or/and F33, you can just dnf install mediawriter
      • This option may not be available yet in your region due to repository mirror synchronization, in that case use one of the other options
  • Using a Flatpak from Flathub running following commands:

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

flatpak install flathub org.fedoraproject.MediaWriter

And then the MediaWriter should appear among your applications.

  • You can also test a development version of MediaWriter to test a new UI. This is available only on Flathub-beta and you can get it by running:

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub-beta https://flathub.org/beta-repo/flathub-beta.flatpakrepo

flatpak install flathub-beta org.fedoraproject.MediaWriter


In Windows and macOS, use the following link: https://github.com/MartinBriza/MediaWriter/releases . There you can download the latest package for your system.

There are also experimental .deb packages for Ubuntu and Debian.

How to test?[edit]

Run the tests[edit]

Visit the QA Test case page and follow the instructions there to install the tool, write an image, and test that it boots. Ideally, try writing several different images, and running the tool on different platforms (Windows, macOS, and Fedora).

To be clear, if you write an image for booting on an Intel system and test boot it on an Intel system, enter your result as ("Intel results"), in the profile column entering the platform you wrote the image from in the comment'. If you write an image for booting on an ARM system and test boot it on an ARM system, enter your result as ("ARM results") in the profile column matching the platform you wrote the image from' in the comment. You don't have to enter a result in every column - just test as many platforms as you can, and leave the columns for platforms you can't test blank. Test Results page can be submitted here

Exploratory testing[edit]

If you run out of test cases, congratulations! But that's not the end! You can still help out by playing around with the tool in whatever ways you can think of: try out all the things you canhttps://github.com/FedoraQt/MediaWriter/releases/download/4.1.6/org.fedoraproject.MediaWriter-4.1.6.flatpak find, and try writing different Fedora images with it. If you have systems with different Windows versions, try running the tool on all of them. Get creative! Any problems you find please file a bug, or report to the IRC channel.

Reporting bugs[edit]

If you have problems with any of the tests, report a bug to Bugzilla usually for the component mediawriter. If you are unsure about exactly how to file the report or what other information to include, just ask on IRC and we will help you.

Test Results[edit]