Screens and Graphics menu item in wrong section

Bug #203612 reported by Kivech
36
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
displayconfig-gtk (Ubuntu)
Fix Released
Medium
Bryce Harrington

Bug Description

In Hardy, "Screens and Graphics" (displayconfig-gtk) was formerly located (up to version 0.3.8) under System/Administration but now (since version 0.3.8ubuntu1) falls under Applications/Other due to a change in /usr/share/applications/displayconfig-gtk.desktop

Tags: iso-testing
Revision history for this message
Martin Pitt (pitti) wrote :

Confirmed here. This is ugly and easy to fix, so it should be done for the final release.

Changed in displayconfig-gtk:
importance: Undecided → Medium
milestone: none → ubuntu-8.04
status: New → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Onkar Shinde (onkarshinde) wrote :

I can create a debdiff for this. But I need confirmation on two things.
1. The second last changelog entry says 'Disable displayconfig-gtk in menus (replaced by Screen Resolution tool)', which obviously has not happened.
2. The .desktop file contains following entries:
Categories=
NotShowIn=KDE;
I think instead of that it should have entries,
Categories=<appropriate entry>
NoDisplay=true

So first thing is whether we should 'really not display' this tool by default. A decision is to be made here for which I don't have authority. Adding back category is not a major problem.

Please let me know what you think.

Revision history for this message
Kivech (kivech-deactivatedaccount) wrote :

I personally would not take it out of the menus personally and just move it. But I'm not the one to make this decision either. Looking forward to seeing how this will be resolved in the end.

Revision history for this message
Conrad Knauer (atheoi) wrote :

From my (duplicate) bug report (Bug #203840)

displayconfig-gtk normally has an entry in the GNOME menu under System -> Administration

With the 0.3.8 -> 0.3.8ubuntu1 update, it disappeared (I found it under Applications -> Other) 0.3.8ubuntu1 -> 0.3.9 didn't fix it.

The problem is in the file /usr/share/applications/displayconfig-gtk.desktop

In 0.3.8, it contained an entry:

---
Categories=GNOME;GTK;Settings;HardwareSettings;System;
---

In 0.3.8ubuntu1 and 0.3.9 it reads:

---
Categories=
---

Revision history for this message
Conrad Knauer (atheoi) wrote :

This apparently was intentional though... as per Synaptic:

---
displayconfig-gtk (0.3.8ubuntu1) hardy; urgency=low

  * Disable displayconfig-gtk in menus (replaced by Screen Resolution tool)
---

But a question; if it should not be in the menus, why install it at all?

description: updated
Conrad Knauer (atheoi)
description: updated
Revision history for this message
Conrad Knauer (atheoi) wrote :

Onkar Shinde wrote:

"The second last changelog entry says 'Disable displayconfig-gtk in menus (replaced by Screen Resolution tool)', which obviously has not happened."

Actually yes it has, but not in quite the same section; its in System/Preferences

The program is gnome-display-properties, part of the gnome-control-center package.

Revision history for this message
Kivech (kivech-deactivatedaccount) wrote :

So to summon it up:

It was supposed to be removed from the menu altogether and be replaced by the Screen Resolution Tool.

The tool was put in place as a replacement of displayconfig-gtk under System>Preferences
However, displayconfig-gtk wasn't removed from the menu it was moved to Applications>Other

Sensible thing to do: remove displayconfig-gtk alltogether (I would also just remove it from the default install).

Am I right?

Revision history for this message
Conrad Knauer (atheoi) wrote :

Marc Baas:

As I recall, gnome-display-properties (GDP) has been around for a few releases, though I don't recall exactly if it was in System/Administration or System/Preferences, though the important thing is that GDP doesn't require root privileges while displayconfig-gtk (DCG) does. Having the dichotomy of regular user privilege stuff in S/A (affecting just your log-in) and things requiring a sudo password in S/P (affecting others' logins too) makes sense to me.

It seems that simply removing the "Categories" from the .desktop file just causes GNOME to dump the icon into a 'catch-all' group, Applications/Other rather than having the intended effect.

Revision history for this message
Bryce Harrington (bryce) wrote :
Changed in displayconfig-gtk:
assignee: nobody → bryceharrington
status: Confirmed → Fix Released
status: Fix Released → Fix Committed
Revision history for this message
Conrad Knauer (atheoi) wrote :

Ah, that explains it; as per the debdiff:

+ * Really disable displayconfig-gtk from menus, not just move to Other.
+ (LP: #203612)
+ - displayconfig-gtk is still required by bulletproof-x mode, so we
+ cannot remove it from the default install at this time.

So it must remain installed, but really should remain hidden from the GNOME menu.

Revision history for this message
dorkdork777 (dorkdork777) wrote :

Wait, so it's being removed? But the Screen Resolution app has no support for selecting type of monitor, or dual displays, or the graphics driver! Or are these things being added to Screen Resolution instead?

I ask because, by default, my monitor is recognised as only supporting 640x480, when really it's fine with (my preferred) 1280x1024. To let it know that, I have to change the monitor type from "Plug 'n' Play" to "LCD Panel 1280x1024", which takes about ten seconds. It would take much longer if Screens and Graphics was removed altogether!

Revision history for this message
Conrad Knauer (atheoi) wrote :

dorkdork777: Only the icon is being removed; I think the goal is basically to have newbies not playing with tools that can disable their GUI :) But its still installed on your system and you can run it with sudo displayconfig-gtk from Terminal...

Revision history for this message
dorkdork777 (dorkdork777) wrote :

But what will the people with dual displays do? Especially the people who have been on Windows for ages, and are now looking to switch to Ubuntu; it would be a very bad first experience to have to run a command right off the bat to get their monitors working the way they should.

Revision history for this message
Conrad Knauer (atheoi) wrote :

dorkdork777: I suspect that the idea is that monitors will (usually) be properly picked up and that they can be configured via gnome-display-properties (System -> Preferences -> Screen Resolution). In the current Hardy version there appears space to show multiple monitors...

Revision history for this message
Conrad Knauer (atheoi) wrote :

After some time considering this bug further, including helping my father-in-law try running the Hardy beta Live CD on his notebook (native resolution is 1024x768 but he only got 800x600 by default) I have a couple new suggestions:

First, if there is a way to have it in the menus but not visible by default, this should be done, e.g. how if you edit the GNOME menu you will note items which you have to put a check-mark next to to appear.

Would modifying the fields:

Categories=GNOME;GTK;Settings;HardwareSettings;System;
NotShowIn=KDE;GNOME

do the trick?

Second, would it make sense to file a new (wishlist-type) bug to have an "Advanced" button put into gnome-display-properties that invokes displayconfig-gtk when pressed?

Revision history for this message
Bryce Harrington (bryce) wrote :

@dorkdork, these days xserver can auto-detect monitors, drivers, and resolutions correctly almost every time. But there are still corner cases (maybe including yours), but they're getting so increasingly rare that having a GUI for specifying the monitor is sort of overkill. It's better for us when we find such cases, to just fix the xserver directly, so users don't need to do any configuration at all. If it isn't getting detected properly, please make sure a bug is filed on the issue (see http://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Debugging).

That said, as Conrad points out, displayconfig-gtk is still present, just not advertised. Unless you're careful and/or lucky, displayconfig-gtk can produce invalid configurations under Hardy, due to the way Xorg has changed, which makes it a lot harder to support and maintain in Hardy than before.

Regarding dual head, displayconfig-gtk is only able to generate valid dual head displays for old Xinerama-based drivers, which are quite rare these days; again, if you are in a corner case where it does work, then by all means keep using displayconfig-gtk for that. But for 99.x% of users, trying to use displayconfig-gtk for this will only break their X. The new Xrandr GUI will eventually support making dual head configs. I don't know if that change will be available for Hardy; if not I will make sure it's available in a PPA, and hopefully get it in for 8.04.1.

Revision history for this message
dorkdork777 (dorkdork777) wrote :

OK, that's fair enough. I've done a little experimenting; the screen resolution is detected fine when using the open-source 'nv' driver, but not when using the 'nvidia' driver. Since the 'nvidia' driver is closed-source, there may not be much you guys can do about it, so I'm not sure if filing a bug would help. Damn NVIDIA for not providing an open source driver with 3D acceleration. >_>

Anyway, alienating 0.x% of users is not a good idea, IMO; 0.1% of the 8 million of so Ubuntu users is still 8,000, and those 8,000 people are much more likely to write bad reviews and so on than any happy Ubuntu user. Plus, if 8.04 is the release that's going to bring more users to Ubuntu (which I can see it doing, having loved the beta for several days), that 8,000 will rise.

My suggestion is to put it under an 'Advanced' category or something like that - something that will stop new users from breaking X with it, but so it's still there for people to use when needed.

Revision history for this message
Onkar Shinde (onkarshinde) wrote :

Why is this bug marked fix commited? Where was the fix commited? Why hasn't it yet entered the repositories?
Also the debdiff attached doesn't look very nice. It has some unexpected deletions.

Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote :

This bug was fixed in the package displayconfig-gtk - 0.3.10

---------------
displayconfig-gtk (0.3.10) hardy; urgency=low

  * Really disable displayconfig-gtk from menus, not just move to Other.
    (LP: #203612)
    - displayconfig-gtk is still required by bulletproof-x mode, so we
      cannot remove it from the default install at this time.

 -- Bryce Harrington <email address hidden> Wed, 19 Mar 2008 20:45:35 -0700

Changed in displayconfig-gtk:
status: Fix Committed → Fix Released
Revision history for this message
electricalen (electricalen) wrote :

I understand the thinking here about removing it as it can hurt your system, however, it basically concedes the fact that some users will be stranded with a broken Ubuntu installation that they cannot fix without expert help. As someone who is that expert, I regularly try to get friends/family to try Ubuntu. I even tried to get my wife's laptop up and running the other day. The X configuration problems are currently unacceptable. I know this is not a Ubuntu specific problem, but the significant work put into polishing the distro, all the nice artwork, and cool new features are all useless when it doesn't work.

This is NOT a 0.1% problem. I have yet to see a perfect install that has the correct video driver and resolution. NVIDIA restricted driver installation works maybe 50% of the time, sometimes it asks you to pick glx-new and glx, and you always end up picking the wrong one, turning Visual Effects on has NEVER worked fully for me, at best it works, but makes video playback crappy and messes up the user switcher, at worst it makes your X session unusable or crashes your system. The "at worst" is the more likely case. Dual head? Forget it. At where I work I have 5 users I support with dual heads, NONE work without custom xorg.conf tweaking. The new 8.04 xorg.conf is devoid of all options, basically saying they are auto configured, now it's even worse trying to tweak the conf yourself.

I know I'm ranting here, but these issues are not given the attention they need. I know it is not the job of the Ubuntu team to fix problems with X, but X can clearly work in all of these cases when configured properly, it is an obtainable goal for this distro to give the user the ability to do this. Waiting for an Xrandr GUI is leaving Ubuntu broken until someone else comes along and makes another crappy tool that half works.

I was on a marathon of Ubuntu installations this week, and still head deep in problems and complaints, so sorry about the flaming, I really do love Ubuntu.

Revision history for this message
Steve Wells (swells-mus) wrote :

Howdy,
      Look, I'm dumb as a rock, new enough to mostly keep my yapper shut and have a coupla strikes against me to start with. Thanks to this thread, I found my missing 'displayconfig-gtk', which was removed from the menu by a recent update.
      FWIW, right now I'm running one of the K8M890M motherboards that has a 'Chroma' video adapter thru a KVM. Last year I wasn't able to get the video working acceptably in the time available using Edgy (when it had just come out.) With this utility on the Hardy, I can make it work.
      The installer has not yet correctly ID'ed my video or screen on either this or other (both newer & older) machines with a variety of video hardware. Before finding the utility and the 'how-to', I was nervous that I'd have to put it away & try again later (because I'm really impressed with Ubuntu.)

      I'm not alienated, but the time I have available to get new computer solutions running is limited. Thanks for listening to my perspective, this thread has been quite helpful.

Revision history for this message
dorkdork777 (dorkdork777) wrote :

I've been following this thread for the past couple weeks, and now I see that it's not just me! Something definitely has to be done about this. There's still two weeks till the final release; this needs to be brought to the attention of the developers.

Revision history for this message
alpha-X-geek (alpha-x-geek) wrote :

It shouldn't be removed and the menu entry should be put back. Many resolution issues have been solved in Hardy with this tool. Also, devs recommended this tool when people complained that "dpkg-reconfigure" didn't let them change driver and resolution settings in Hardy.

Nathan

Revision history for this message
alpha-X-geek (alpha-x-geek) wrote :

Forgot the above post, just noticed the post about Xrandr and its GUI.

Nathan

To post a comment you must log in.
This report contains Public information  
Everyone can see this information.

Duplicates of this bug

Other bug subscribers

Remote bug watches

Bug watches keep track of this bug in other bug trackers.