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• Launchpad Entry: about-this-computer

• Packages affected:

Summary

Redesign the current "About Ubuntu" menu option such that it contains useful information such as the Ubuntu derivative name, version number, basic information about the system. This should be visually attractive, and could be an ideal place for easter eggs.

ScottJamesRemnant: summary no longer matches the content of the specification, adjust.

Release Note

New with this version of Ubuntu, the "About Ubuntu" and "About Gnome" dialogs have been replaced with a more generic "About This Computer" dialog that shows basic information about your machine along with software versions for Gnome or KDE.

Rationale

The current "About Ubuntu" and "About GNOME" items are not helpful, elegant, or (least importantly) consistent with what people expect from other operating systems. And merely having two menu items gives the impression that Ubuntu is fragmented and disorganized.

Use Cases

• Third-party software often has minimum system requirements, most often involving the operating system version, processor speed, and amount of memory available. Often they also mention a particular amount of disk space, but this is much less important (because people almost always have enough). Occasionally they have other requirements (such as a particular graphics card).

ScottJamesRemnant: tech support often requires knowing an overview of the hardware the user is running.

• Tech support for Ubuntu often requires knowing what version of Ubuntu someone is using. People often have trouble scanning text on a computer screen, so embedding the Ubuntu version in lots of other text can be frustrating.
• Tech support for Linux in general often requires knowing what Linux kernel version someone is using, and sometimes requires knowing what version of Gnome or KDE they are using.

Design

• [http://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/aboutgui Comparisons from other graphical environments]

ScottJamesRemnant: this is missing the design of the dialog! It seems to have slipped into implementation; place a rough idea of the dialog here, what information will it contain and how will it be organised?

Implementation

About Your Computer (about-window) is a Python script that determines if you are running Gnome or KDE, and then picks the relevant toolkit to display the window.

ScottJamesRemnant: About Your or About This? Name of package? How will the frontends be implemented? How will it determine whether you are running GNOME or KDE? What does it fall back to if you're running neither?

We query follow information:

• CPU type and speed, using /proc/cpuinfo
• RAM, using /proc/meminfo, or "free"
• Version of Ubuntu, using lsb-release.
• Version of desktop environment -- this is a can of worms, but we are limiting ourselves to querying the version of GNOME, KDE or XFCE. If we find none of them, then do not display anything.
• Version of the Linux kernel, using uname -r

Once we have all of this information, we use Glade and whatever it is PyQT uses to layout a dialog box. A title bar of About Your Computer, a large SVG of a computer on the left hand size, and the information laid out in two sections, the first being:

ScottJamesRemnant: this bit is "design"

CPU: <CPU type> <CPU speed>
Memory: <RAM information>

ScottJamesRemnant: the session discussed having graphics card, network card, etc. here What happened to them?

The second section is:

<icon grabbed from the icon theme> Ubuntu <Ubuntu version>
(Only displayed if gnome-session exists) <gnome icon> Gnome <Gnome version>
(Only displayed if kded exists) <KDE icon> KDE <KDE version>
(Only displayed if xfce-session exists) <XFCE icon> XCFE <XCFE version>
<tux icon> Linux <kernel version>

A Close button on the bottom right of the window.

All text should be able to be drag and dropped as one large block into IRC, a bug report or a forum post.

UI Changes

• New Dialog
  • Grabs icon from icon them "start-here"

ScottJamesRemnant: Shouldn't the window icon be a computer icon, not a distributor icon? Or does this mean the icon inside the dialog?

• Looks for system information from a file set by meta packages
• Has dragable text to e-mail/IRC/forum/etc

Migration

An "About This Computer" item on the System menu will replace the "About Ubuntu", and "About Gnome" menu items.

ScottJamesRemnant: what happened to the information in About Ubuntu and About GNOME? How do users get at similar information now?

KDE

An "About This Computer" item will be added to the standard KDE application Help menu which will launch the QT version of the app.

XFCE

An "About This Computer" item will be added to the System menu.

Test/Demo Plan

Check that for common hardware (everything testers can get their hands on and more), that About Your Computer correctly detects the Ubuntu version, the processor and the RAM size (with appropriate and correct scaling/rounding), along with the desktop environments that the user has installed.

Future Work

ScottJamesRemnant: it's not clear to me why this is future work?

Querying more about the computer, such as:

• Hard disk size (use the disk / hangs off)

ScottJamesRemnant: or total all disks?

• Graphics card
• Network card

See Also

• AboutUbuntu

• AboutUbuntuRevisited

CategorySpec