By now, many of you have heard about one of my projects i’ve been heads down on… Firefox OS.  Codename’d “Boot 2 Gecko”, it’s mozilla’s project on putting together a fully Web-based OS that will take on the smartphone market.   It will support everything you would expect from a smartphone, (friend dialing, spouse messaging, internet browsing, web gaming, photo taking, video watching, and music bumping!)   Read the blogpost for more details on what and where we’re deploying to.

On the Quality front, i’ve been building up a small-but-growing team to take on this behemoth project.   The phone we’re working on will consist of 3 basic software layers: Gonk (kernal, HAL, and low-level components), Gecko (rendering engine, web APIs), and Gaia (HTML5 User interface layer).   Our test approach is to create mochitests against the DOM and API layer, and run regression tests against a Jenkins CI system.   On the UI, we will take a more traditional acceptance approach, executing testcases against Apps in an end to end scenario; and building webapps that will utilize supported B2G apis.   All this, to delivery in a very aggressive timeline, and working with multiple partners on different Quality approaches at every level.

We’ve been culturally challenged to build up a interested community of testers, but limited to our distribution of builds due to legal contracts.   However, the release engineering team was able to get Daily desktop builds created and published online for anyone to play with.  Refer to Gaia/Hacking for setup instructions.  If you’re a web developer, you can use these builds to create and test your webApp against.  If you’re looking to help do some testing, these desktop builds will also give you an immediate opportunity to play with and help us write testplans and file bugs.    We encourage anyone interested to give the desktop builds a spin (available on Mac, Windows, and Linux), and get involved with the project!

For more information on getting involved with Development and Testing, visit https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G to get started.
Update: Many are wondering why they see a “black” screen after launching the B2G Desktop build.   It’s likely because you havent set up a Gaia profile prior to launching.  here’s how you do it.  (again, refer to Gaia/hacking for better steps!)

1) For your win32/linux/osx computer, download and install a nightly “B2G Desktop” build from: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/b2g/nightly/
2) on command line, run:

  •     $ git clone git://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia
  •     $ make -C gaia profile
  •     $ /path/to/b2g -profile gaia/profile
  •      (eg. Tonys-MacBook-Air:MacOS tchung$ ./b2g -profile /Users/tchung/Desktop/DailyB2G/07172012_desktop/gaia/profile)

3) you should see content now.

 
Update 2: Building Desktop builds on Windows

There is a discussion thread started about building on windows. it’s much more complicated, and i personally have not tried. Please give it a spin and let us know how it goes!

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/mozilla.dev.b2g/ALhvaLP-WtA/discussion

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