Whee! As of today, have a desktop and it's pretty much set up to be usable. This took far too much time (I probably need some sort of proprietary ethernet driver). Seth and Henry are wonderfully, wonderfully patient people...
On the testing front, I'm in the middle of upgrade testing for data integrity - this is something you can do at home with your XO and give us feedback on. Basically, we're interested in finding out whether you can upgrade from your current build (make sure to tell us what build that is!) to 8.2-860 (the current release candidate) and whether saved Activity sessions you have from before the upgrade still work with the upgraded build and Activities. I'm just testing Write, Record, TurtleArt, eToys, and Browse, but maybe your favorite Activity isn't on that list and you want to make sure it'll still work post-upgrade - well, here's a good excuse to find out now.
Frances and I are working on splitting up smoke test procedures so we have smoke tests unique to each release, since every build has a slightly different feature set. We'll let you know when we're all set on this - one thing that would be helpful to know is whether the current level of detail is easy enough for newbies to follow. In other words, can you get through the current smoke test instructions without getting confused or having to ask someone questions? If not, why not? Please let us know!