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Please check the status of this specification in Elisa, an open-source Media-Center in Python/Gstreamer Project before editing it. If it is Approved, contact the Assignee or another knowledgeable person before making changes.

• Launchpad entry: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/elisa/+spec/aboutumc

• Contributors: Bhavani Shankar

• Packages affected: AboutUMC, ubuntu-artwork

Summary

To make UMC more flexible and easier to support, it will have an About box that displays the Ubuntu version and basic information about the system.

Rationale

People are used to "About Name of Program" showing a window that gives the software version details, and copyright info. Since many people do not distinguish between the computer and the operating system, other operating systems also include in their About box basic info about the computer the system is running on. UMC should be just as flexible.

Use cases

• Angelica installed UMC a couple of months ago, from a CD she picked up at her university Internet lab. Now she has found the UMC Web site, sees that the latest version of UMC is x.y, and wants to know whether she's running the latest version.

• Ravi, a marketing pundit, wants to make sure people using UMC can find more information about the system.
• Nathan, a recent Gentoo convert, follows the bleeding edge of Grumpy Groundhog. He wants an easy way of seeing what kernel version he's running.
• Bhavi, a sysadmin, wants an easy way for his users to check some basic specifics of their system, so he can diagnose problems more quickly.

Design

* Choosing the "About UMC" menu item should open the About window, visually centered on the screen. It should behave properly with respect to startup notification and session saving. The window should be closable using either Alt-F4 or the close button.

• The About window should include:
  • UMC logo and version number (most required!)
  • computer model, if available
  • CPU speed and amount of RAM on the system
  • a "Hardware Details" button that opens the Device Manager
  • Linux kernel version number
  • KDE/Gnome version number.
  • This "About Box" could also include a button "Generate System Report". As newbies often are asked to add system details like their sources.list, lspci, lsmod and the like(in launchpad answers or ubuntu forums), they tend to have a hard time gathering these information. Maybe they could select/unselect the appropriate buttons for the config file they want to be exported..?
• Any of the informative text should be drag-and-droppable as plain text into another program.

Implementation

Code

AboutUMC should be implemented as a small pygtk program.

dmidecode cannot supply the information about the computer, because it requires administrator access. Therefore:

• The computer model is read from lshal | grep procfs.cpuinfo.model_name, or left blank if that line is not present.

• The CPU speed is read from cpufreq if it exists, or from /proc/cpuinfo otherwise. (If cpufreq doesn't exist, the CPU probably isn't slowed down, so /proc/cpuinfo will be accurate.)

• The amount of RAM is read from free or /proc/meminfo.

Unresolved issues

None

BoF agenda and discussion