Ubuntu Wiki

• Launchpad Entry: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/ue-gnome-ui

• Created: Date(2005-10-31T16:34:49Z) by JaneWeideman

• Contributors: JaneWeideman, ColinWatson, MatthewPaulThomas

• Packages affected: ubuntu-express

Summary

UbuntuExpress - GNOME user interface

A user interface for the UbuntuExpress installer.

A user interface component, written in Python, which will drive the installation process. It will ask questions of the user, and invoke backend routines to act on the user's choices.

Rationale

Since we'll be doing a Qt-based interface as well for KubuntuExpress, the user interface must be cleanly separated from the functional installer backend. The [http://interactors.coop/~trunks/installer/ Guadalinex installer] already does this quite well, although both the frontend and the backend need significant work before meeting our requirements.

Use cases

Scope

Design

Installation experience is theater.

Invocation

• The Live CD desktop should contain an "Install Ubuntu Permanently" icon. (Wording TBC.)
• The installation window should not be full-screen.

Language and introduction

The first page of the installer lets you choose your language, and displays an explanatory blurb in the selected language: "Installing permanently will let you run Ubuntu at full speed and without the CD." (The bootloader lets you select the language on x86 but not PPC.)

Keymap

Personal information

• What is your name?
• Choose a password (enter twice)
• What login name would you like?
  • This is the name you will use when logging in to Ubuntu. If more than one person will use this computer, you can set up other accounts later.

The name defaults to the first word of the person's name, converted to lower case.

Computer name

• What name would you like to give your computer?
  • This name will be visible if you make your computer visible to others on a network.

This defaults to the hostname from DHCP/DNS if available, otherwise "ubuntu".

Initially, the field is restricted to ASCII characters. The name is used as-is for Avahi configuration, and a normalized version is used as the hostname. The hostname has spaces converted to dashes, and other punctuation stripped; this conversion is presented live during the input.

Dapper+1: provide a way of customizing the hostname separately.

Timezone and location

• Choose the city nearest to you, for timezone
  • map (Can we just highlight the country/timezone boundries on mouseover so you deon't select a city but a whole region? Lets try to avoid precision clicking. I would even prefer a dropdown for timezone to this. We could even suggest a time zone if an ntp server can be reached based off of their computer's clock.)
• List of country-like entities (used for suggesting default keymaps, currencies, etc)
• allows faster software updates -- closer mirrors.

If time: Highlight the entire timezone on the map.

Partitioning

See UbuntuExpress/PartitioningTool.

Progress information

A single progress bar should be displayed at the end.

TBD: Work out how to allow cancelling installation of language packs. ( Skip )

Show some sort of demo (Flash v3?) during the installation progress. Put this in an expander (expanded by default), so people can see just the progress if they want.

Implementation

Since the Guadalinex team has already implemented a significant amount of this, we will use their work as a base. However, discounting minor user interface tweaks, the current code base has the problem that it duplicates both code and translatable strings from the installer, which causes problems such as desynchronisation of functionality with the installer (e.g. username/password validation in current ubuntu-express produces different results from the installer's validation code) and the loss of many existing translations of strings from the installer.

[:ColinWatson:I] believe that both issues can be solved by borrowing infrastructure from [:OEMInstaller:oem-config], where I had to address similar problems and did so using a debconf protocol filter: debconf-using code (e.g. installer code) can be run unmodified inside a wrapper that runs custom user interface code rather than a standard debconf frontend, and translated strings can be extracted directly from the debconf database.

Aside from that, a quick glance over the Guadalinex code suggests that its user interface has reasonably good separation between frontend and backend: the frontend asks all questions up-front and then runs widget-set-independent backend code that feeds answers into the debconf database and performs the installation proper. (Integration with oem-config may suggest answers reaching the debconf database while the frontend is running, but that's OK.)

• Move debconffilter from oem-config into debconf proper.
• TODO

Code

Data preservation and migration

Outstanding issues

BoF agenda and discussion

Future work

• "Who will be using this computer?" -- multiple names at once, to encourage use of individual accounts.
• Transfer home folder -- copy non-dot-files (and fonts).