day at the office

Today, Tracy Walker and I (with some help from Sarah, Marcia, and Chase,) reorganized the QA space at the Mozilla Foundation. We condensed six desks holding 9 machines, 8 huge old CRT monitors, 8 keyboards, and about a dozen mice, into a much more comfortable four desks with two solid KVMs, that switch our primary 6 machines (two stations, each consisting of a Mac, Windows, and Linux boxen) so that we could get down to two nice LCD screens, and two keyboard mouse combos.

Tomorrow I'll be adding VMWare to the Linux and Windows boxen and wiping out the dual and triple boot partitions. That'll save us a lot of time and ease up testing tasks that require lots of clipboard/cut/paste stuff. It should also give us a little more control over keeping some "clean" and some "dirty" systems without the OS reinstalls that can take forever.

I think for the VMWare setups I'll start by making sure that the Linux machines also have access to a Windows install and that the Windows machines have a linux distro on them. Then we'll see about filling in any gaps in coverage with additional VMs.

To pull this all off, I still need to get two more machines, a G5 to replace the aging blue & white that just crawls with OS X, and an old Kayak PII that's been Sarah's primary Linux box for the last year. If I can get those two machines replaced and get a solid RAM upgrade for the other four, I think we'll have a much better time with our testing.

Anyone know where great deals on Mac G5s can be had? It doesn't have to be cutting edge, the 1.6 or 1.8 Ghz models would be a huge step forward. I think I can find a PC that stomps that old Kayak without too much difficulty, but Macs are so much more expensive. Also, if you know of good places to buy bulk RAM (where bulk is a few GB in 512MB sticks) please let me know. Thanks.