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What is Hardware Certification?

Canonical applies Ubuntu Certified to systems that have been tested within Canonical’s certification laboratories and have passed all of the tests that comprise the certification test suite. These machines are deployed in a certification lab throughout the life cycle of the release.

Machines in Canonical’s certification laboratories are also tested against the development release of Ubuntu to prevent version upgrade regressions. Unless Ubuntu Certified is requested for multiple version of Ubuntu in the early alpha phase of Ubuntu’s development, upgrade regression proofing is done as a best-effort and not guaranteed.

Machines shown to pass Ubuntu Certification are publicly listed as such at http://www.ubuntu.com/certification

Why is it beneficial for the Ubuntu Community?

The Hardware Certification team makes sure that mainstream systems (Desktops, laptops, netbooks and servers) work well with Ubuntu and users are aware of it. The team hosts a large lab (+200 system) on which we perform ongoing tests to make sure that new releases are still compatible from as early as Alpha1. We report bugs (look for pcert tag) for any failures and work with upstream developers to resolve them.

We are also running certification testing quicker and with wider coverage. We have now started testing SRUs for Lucid and Maverick in the Hardware lab, allowing for more frequent updates to stable releases. During Natty, we are also looking to support the performance and compatibility testing of Unity across the wide range of Hardware hosted in our labs.

How can you contribute to this initiative?

We are keen on leading changes to the Certification portal, to make the data more relevant to Ubuntu users.

While we are always revisiting the scope of certification, there is small issues or quirks that only become apparently during constant usage of the systems. We will like to share that information with the users via the certification notes. So, if you happen to have one of the certified systems and would like to give us your feedback or if you feel that the notes for this particular system could be better, you can file a bug or ask a question against the Ubuntu Certification Launchpad project.