AboutUbuntu

Revision 7 as of 2005-11-01 20:29:17

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Summary

Rationale

Professional operating systems have About boxes that display the operating system version, copyright info, and a few important details about the computer the system is running on. These About boxes do not have Back buttons, tables of contents, scrollbars, or other junk. Ubuntu should be just as polished.

Use cases

Scope

Design

  • Choosing the "About Ubuntu" menu item opens the About window, visually centered on the screen. It behaves properly with respect to startup notification and session saving. The window is closable using either Ctrl+W or the close button in the title bar.
  • The About window includes:
    • Ubuntu logo and version number (most prominent)
    • computer model, if available
    • CPU speed
    • amount of RAM on the system
    • Linux kernel icon and version number
    • reference to the GNU system
    • Gnome icon and version number.
  • Any of the version info can be dragged and dropped as plain text into another program.

Implementation

Code

AboutUbuntu is 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.

  • 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.

Data preservation and migration

Outstanding issues

  • code to close window on Ctrl+W isn't working
  • '\n \l' needs stripping from version details
  • '"Breezy Badger"' needs stripping from version details
  • lshal | grep procfs.cpuinfo.model_name isn't behaving as expected

  • "More Details..." needs to open hal-device-manager
  • drag and drop isn't implemented

BoF agenda and discussion