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• Launchpad entry: kubuntu-feisty-ubiquity

• Packages affected: ubiquity

Summary

Changes to Ubiquity in Kubuntu Feisty.

Rationale

As our default installer, we should ensure Ubiquity is ready for the change to KDE 4 and as usable as possible.

Use cases

Boab is installing Kubuntu and gets annoyed that the labels on the map are always hidden behind the mouse cursor.

Sebas wants to make a KDE 4 only version of Kubuntu and needs an installer which doesn't use KDE 3.

Scope

Port to Qt 4 and improve usability issues.

Implementation

Qt 4 Port

Porting to Qt 4 means getting rid of KDE classes in Ubiquity. We already use Qt dialogues because of stability issues with KDE dialogues in Python, so there are not many KDE-only classes used. The only one which has no replacement is the xembed class which comes from KDE. The port is dependent on the new Ubiquity partitioner so we no longer need to embed external applications.

KApplication should be ported to QApplication. Opening webpages in KRun should be replaced by using the xdg-utils scripts. KListView should be replaced with QListView.

The UI file will be ported with the qt3to4 script.

The new partitioner will be a copy of the GTK user interface. The hardest part to implement is the disk bar widget, which can be implemented with the new QGraphicsView in Qt 4.2. This needs us to package the PyQt 4.1 bindings which are now available.

Usability

A usability review has given us various small issues to be improved.

The progress bar is not a smooth progress from 0 to 100%, but resets to 0% at each new stage in the backend. Colin has a fix for this which we need to test to ensure it works correctly.

The logo on the user interface should be removed to make it easier to rebrand Kubuntu.

The final progress bar is currently in a dialogue window. As discussed in ubiquity-slideshow, we will change it to be a new page on the main window which includes the slide show at the top and the progress bar at the bottom.

The introduction page should be turned on during install to warn users this is alpha code and potentially destructive.

The language selection and welcome page layouts should be changed to have the text on the left and the language list on the right, rather than top and bottom at the moment.

The city labels on the timezone page should appear above the city rather than below it, since at present they are often obscured by the mouse cursor.

Indentation of the widgets should be removed from the keyboard layout page and the user details page, as this is inconsistent with the user interface guidelines.

The spacing on the user details and language pages should be made consistent since currently the spacers have slightly different values that become apparent when the window is resized.

Finally, the strings for the Back, Forward, and Cancel buttons need to be added to the list of translatable strings, as they are currently untranslatable unless the relevant language packs are installed in the live session.

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