Hardware certification

A process of ensuring that a specific device works well with Ubuntu. For more details see our certification program:

Hardware certification team
A team inside Canonical working on Hardware Certification.
Checkbox is a hardware testing tool developed by Canonical for certifying hardware with Ubuntu. Checkbox is free software and is available at
Name of the package in Ubuntu Archive that contains Checkbox.
Plainbox is a functional core of the Checkbox. These days it’s almost synonymous with Checkbox.
Test plan
Test plans are text files used by Checkbox to select jobs for execution. They can include simple regular expressions to match and pick many similar jobs at once.
Jobs are smallest units of testing that can be performed by Checkbox. All jobs have an unique name. There are many types of jobs, some are fully automated others are fully manual. Some jobs are only an implementation detail and a part of the internal architecture of Checkbox.
A container for jobs, test plans, private executables and data. Providers are the foundation of Checkbox as they provide all of the content. Providers can be created and managed by any entity, separately from the Checkbox project.
A private space for naming job definitions. Each job definition has a partial identifier and a full identifier (typically just called job id). The partial identifier is encoded in job definition file. The full identifier is composed of the namespace of a job provider and the partial identifier, joined with the double-colon string ::.
Resources are collections of key-value data sets that are generated by special resource jobs. They are extensively used to indicate hardware or software dependencies. For example a bluetooth test may indicate it requires bluetooth hardware and appropriate software packages installed.
Phase of a Checkbox session where resource jobs are executed to gather information about the hardware.
Requirement program
Requirement programs are small (one to few lines) programs that use a subset of python to execute some code against resources. They are what actually describes the relationship of a Job to some Resources. For example a resource program == "bluez" indicates that at least one resource generated by the package job has a key name equal to the string bluez.
Attachments are a special type of a Job that can create an attachment record in the submission reports. They are commonly used to include basic system information files and output of certain commands which can aid in system certification.
Certification Website
The website
Secure ID
An identifier, similar to Canonical ID, used for hardware certification. This identifier is used when interacting with the Certification Website, it does not reveal anything about the actual hardware (like the manufacturer name or device name).
The Python Package Index where any developer can share their python programs and libraries. Pypi is available at: