Ubiquity window does not fit on 640x480 screen

I've noticed that the font DPI is set to 118 by default. It used to be 96. Changing this value did not help. Even removing the bottom panel completely did not help, as the window is simply too tall to reveal the bottom buttons.

Confirm, ubiquity dialogues are unusable on netbook 1024x600 panel since Alpha4.
In Jaunty Alpha 3 dialogues were OK.

Seems to be related to the new feature of Alpha 4: "Font Size Optimization: Font dot-per-inch settings are now optimized based on your monitor's capabilities, rather than defaulting to 96 dpi." (from http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/jaunty/alpha4).

See attached installer dialogues from Alpha 3 and Alpha 4, they illustrate the problem.

I verified whether display dpi was correctly detected by Alpha4 (the screenshots above), and yes dpi was correct.
DPI was detected as 134 dpi, this is the correct value for eee's 1024x600 9" screen.

It seems that fonts are correctly adjusted for high dpi, but correctly displayed 10pt font simply becomes too big for a 9" screen to run installer.

As a suggestion, maybe on for smaller, high-dpi screens dpi detection could adjust default font size too?
For example, "if less than N lines of default size text fit on the screen, reduce default font size to fit at least N lines" ?
This would be more elegant solution than forcing user to change to a fake 96 dpi.

this is affected by, but still a separate issue to Jaunty showing large fonts because of dpi settings (comment 7 confirmed this problem exists even with correctly detected dpi settings)

confirming by "popular vote" ;-)

This is still an issue with Beta 5 on an Acer Aspire One.

Still an issue with Alpha 5 on Asus Eee 901 also. Changing to 96dpi works as a temporary measure to get the system installed.

Asus Eee 901, alpha5: same issue, connecting external monitor and using higher resolution helps as a workaround.

IMHO the bug importance should be at least "Medium" or "High", because:

1) A person coming from Windows experience can be completely stuck on the very first step of installer. There is no visible way to access <Quit>/<Back>/<Forward> buttons in ubiquity (no scrollbars, no panning). It is more than a minor inconvenience - it prevents user from installing Ubuntu. Even if they don't give up and find some workaround, it spoils first impression (cant even run installer).

2) Virtually all 9" netbooks (asus, dell, acer...) have similar 1024x600 9" screens with ~134 dpi.
All of them seem to be affected. This is bad as low-cost netbook segment is important for Jaunty.

I'm told that the font size is stored in libgnome, and that this has been a general issue for a number of applications recently. Duplicating; people who know this issue in detail are free to undo the duplication if it turns out that ubiquity requires additional work.

Unduplicating. Bug 310353 certainly aggravated this, but even aside from font size, Markus Korn posted http://ubuntu-pics.de/bild/11245/bildschirmfoto_8e7pk8.png which doesn't appear to have unreasonable font size and still doesn't fit. Evan?

The window is currently 546px tall. This appears to be entirely due to the user setup page, and unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much we can do there. Most of the space on that page is used up, and everything strikes me as being equally important.

I therefore think we have two options. We can either violate the HIG slightly and trim some spacing away, or we can pack the main VBox in a scrolled window, which I personally think would be a bit ugly.

As the panels are 24px each, we only need to shave 6px off to fit in 600px.

It might also be worth noting that ubiquity should have no issue displaying on a 1024x600 screen in the Install Ubuntu mode.

it is worth noting that there are a handful of netbooks that are
shipping with a 576px panel instead of a 600px. Of course this
complicates the problem even more :)

Perhaps some of these extra long strings can be moved on the right or
left of the entry boxes instead.

These netbooks don't appear to have any such deficiencies
horizontally, so there is plenty of real estate to capitalize upon if
necessary.

On 03/19/2009, Evan Dandrea <email address hidden> wrote:
> The window is currently 546px tall. This appears to be entirely due to
> the user setup page, and unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much we
> can do there. Most of the space on that page is used up, and everything
> strikes me as being equally important.
>
> I therefore think we have two options. We can either violate the HIG
> slightly and trim some spacing away, or we can pack the main VBox in a
> scrolled window, which I personally think would be a bit ugly.
>
> As the panels are 24px each, we only need to shave 6px off to fit in
> 600px.
>
> It might also be worth noting that ubiquity should have no issue
> displaying on a 1024x600 screen in the Install Ubuntu mode.
>
> --
> Jaunty Alpha 4: Ubiquity windows does not fit on 1024x600 screen
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/325958
> You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
> Installer Team, which is subscribed to ubiquity in ubuntu.
>

--
Sent from my mobile device

Mario Limonciello
<email address hidden>

Obviously, the installer also doesn't fit 800×480 screens, like in the eeepc 700 series or nokia n8*0 tablets.

Judging by the fonts in the screenshots, this seems like it may be related to bug 310353

This bug is still present in the Xubuntu jaunty-desktop-amd64.iso and jaunty-desktop-i386.iso dated 20090324.1. This is the pre-release for Jaunty Beta. Unfortunately, I do have a normal size 17" CRT that is not able to show the entire screen when "Install Xubuntu" is chosen from the startup menu. They are much bigger than if "Try Xubuntu without any change ..." is selected and the install executed from the desktop. Since this is a normal screen, it should be able to show the entire panels.

I've looked into this a bit further.

If I pack the "Who are you?" page into a scrolled window, the size shrinks down to 694x371 until I get to the automatic partitioning page, where it jumps up to 694x539 (when two drives are present). Part of the problem here seems to be the partition bars are requesting an allocation that is exactly twice as tall as it needs to be. I'm looking into this now.

Equally, the more disks are present, the more this page is going to grow. Colin suggested in bug 320977 that we pack the automatic partitioning page in a scrolled window as well. But late in the Jaunty cycle I was speaking with Matthew Paul Thomas about the UI of this page and he suggested a number of changes, among them putting the drives in a drop down box and moving it to the top of the page, which I mocked up (beneath some of his other mock-ups) here [1].

I'm not suggesting that we try to move from "select an option, then a disk" to "select a disk, then an option" by moving the disk selection to the top of the page. But perhaps putting the disks in a drop-down box instead of radio buttons, in the same place on the page, would be a good start.

1: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/JauntyUbiquityUsability?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=automatic_partitioning.pdf

I've committed fixes to ubiquity trunk for making sure the partition bars do not grow larger than they need to be (though looking now it appears there's more to fix here as it's still a little too big), as well as moving selecting a disk via option buttons to selecting it via a drop down box.

With the change to pack the "Who are you?" page into a scrolled window, which I haven't committed yet, the installer is 530px tall. I suspect I'll be able to take off another 10-15px once I figure out what's going wrong with the partition bar size allocation.

I can confirm this bug for Jaunty / Ubuntu 9.04 Beta.

I got this problem while trying to install Kubuntu 9.04 on my eeepc.

The temporary solution is using the alternate disk for Kubuntu 9.04(Beta).
You can put an alternate disk ISO on a memory stick with unetbootin tool. (No need to burn any CD for installing)

http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

Two suggestions for the "Who are you?" page:
1. Move the "Log in automatically" checkbox to 12px to the right of the "What name do you want to use to log in" field (where it really should have been anyway).
2. Fix bug 287626.

@Matthew: this may solve the problem for 1024x600 screens but it won't solve it for the smaller 7" netbooks that have a 800x480 screen resolution. What about having specific behaviour for very small screens, such as scrollbars splitting the wizard into smaller screens with less information on each of them?

If we are serious about Ubuntu being a good netbook OS through UNR, we need Ubiquity to work at all screen resolutions, even the smallest ones.

I didn't read the previous comments in detail, and I didn't know any vendor was still selling netbooks with 480-pixel-high displays. If catering for those displays is a priority, I suggest that Ubiquity automatically start full-screen whenever the display is less than 550px or so high. That way, the panels and title bar won't be taking up vertical space.

It does not matter if any vendor is currently selling such netbooks or not. I don't think this is a reasonable condition upon which it should be decided whether to support 800x480 screens or not. My notebook is no longer produced, does that mean we should drop support for it? Just because nothing was done to support those screens during the first netbook boom doesn't mean nothing should be done now. Granted, it is a small part of the install base, but they do exist and because of that they should be supported. If this is too hard and/or late to do now it should be deferred to Karmic, but it should be done.

Vendors have been coming out with more 9-10" screen models recently but most 7" models have a 800x480 resolution, such as the EeePC 701 or the Nokia web tablets.

Anyway, the real problem for netbooks as I see it is that the maximus package in Netbook Remix automatically resizes standard windows to the screen's size but doesn't do anything with modal dialogue windows, which is what seems to be used in Ubiquity (please correct me if I'm wrong). There could be 2 approaches to resolving that problem:

1. Make Ubiquity use a window type that maximus can handle (possibly only do that if the maximus package is installed).

2. Change maximus so that it can resize all types of windows.

Having said this, there is another use case which I think we should consider: what if the user trying to install Ubuntu has selected large fonts on purpose (such as a user with bad eyesight)? In this case, even on a large screen you could have a situation where the window ends up being larger than the screen. So maybe the criteria would be to start Ubiquity full screen based on a combination of screen area and font metrics?

Same problem with:

Aplying changes / Installing software screen...

I can´t see the "close" button...

(Only when I click to "details")

Another argument is that some mid devices have smaller screens and screen resolutions of 800x480 are common in that space. As more mids hit the market, this will become a greater issue.

Same problem with others applications/screens, like APPORT when I send a crash report, and I enable detail view of the report that I want to send...

Same problem with others applications/screens, like APPORT when I send a crash report, and I enable detail view of the report that I want to send...

I have a similar problem with kubuntu desktop installer. is it the same (ubiquity?) ?
I am using a 1024x600 res. netbook and I still can't install.
is there a fix yet ?

Installing Jaunty on a netbook. There is no fix, but there is a workaround.

* Download the alternate ISO. The one with the text installer.
* Put this ISO on your bootable USB stick with (http://lubi.sourceforge.net/unetbootin.html)
* And boot from USB stick the alternate installer.

This is a Beta version and I really won't advise to use it as a production system. If you use your netbook for production I think it is wise to use a big SD card for doing experimental installations. I have 16Gb but I think 8Gb should work too. Read the manual for booting from stick and SD card as test system.

I've fixed bug 287626 at Matthew's suggestion.

With Ubiquity 1.12.2, which adjusts the timezone map size depending on the screen size, the interface takes up a respectable amount of room on 1024x768, scales down to fit comfortably on 800x600, and *almost* fits (and is IMO usable) on 640x480. Thus, I'm going to downgrade this bug and take it off the release-critical list for Jaunty; I think we've done enough for the moment.

In the 640x480 case, the main problem is actually horizontal space - so 800x480 will be mostly fine - although the buttons at the bottom right do go a little bit off-screen once we reach the partitioner. This could perhaps be rectified by moving the (currently broken) warning message about "Use entire disk" up to alongside the radio button rather than below the drop-down box.

I understand that using Ubiquity 1.12.2 will be a workaround for installing on a 600px height screen.
How can install Ubiquity 1.12.2 prior to installing ?
Is it a upgrade which we can get by "apt-get" ?

I updated ubiquity prior to installation with command "apt-get install ubiquity"
This time the windows fit my screen but in the beginning of the installation while copying files, I got an error stating that some files can not be copied.
IS it because I ugraded ubiquity spoiling the structure of install media ?

mrmrmrmr,

No, but please open a new bug report if you think this message was in error. I'd first suggest checking the md5sum of the ISO you downloaded, and running the "check CD for errors" option before filing a bug.

Same problem with Gparted, when expand the details display...

fjuarez, this bug report is about Ubiquity, not gparted. Please report a separate bug about gparted.

@Colin,

I can confirm it now works fine on 800x480 with the latest UNR nightly image. I see your point about horizontal space though.

This still and issue after install. The bottom of movie player and many other programs are cut-off. I was able to install eeepc tray but this broke my Fn key bindings. The intel driver utility allowed for scrolling as a solution, can't this be auto configured in xorg.conf at startup? If not for some workaround I would DEFINITELY go back to windows. This affects all software so...do I file a bug for xorg? I should have the same choices as the Win32 intel driver: 1024x600, 1024x768 scrolling (virtual) or 1024x762 (compressed). I new user has no idea how to edit a .conf file with confidence that they will not break something.

For video issues after the installation has completed and you restarted your computer, please report a new bug. You can do so using 'ubuntu-bug xorg' . After entering the summary, a large description box is available to state what is happening.

Closing due to inactivity.