Installer windows are sometimes too tall for small wide-screen devices (netbooks)

[Jeff Lane ]

Binary package hint: ubiquity

Some of the Ubiquity windows are too tall for widescreen netbooks (or my widescreen netbook at least). I'm running this on a lenovo S10 netbook. After booting the installer, the first screen (that asks if I want to Try Ubuntu Live, or Install Ubuntu) is too tall for the display.

I ran into this another time while trying installs on this netbook when a window resized (I tried manual partitioning) and resized itself too much for this screen. I had to alt-click-hold to drag the window up so I could even see the navigation buttons in this case.

[Erick Brunzell (lbsolost)]

Not that it's a duplicate by any means but I wonder if work on this bug could be combined with work on bug 628097?

[Evan (ev)]

The advanced partitioning page is due to an excessively verbose string in the bootloader options.

Other than the welcome and advanced partitioning pages, were there any other pages that did not fit on the screen?

[Jeff Lane  (bladernr)]

I don't belive there were... the rest seemed to be OK.

[Robert Roth (evfool)]

See a screenshot in one of the duplicates, bug #729057 (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/729057/+attachment/1885173/+files/Allocate-drive-space.png) It is clear that something should be done with the Boot loader related text. As this is and advanced partitioning tool, the text can be hidden as a tooltip, a section with an expander, or a help button.

[Eliah Kagan (degeneracypressure)]

Besides on netbooks, I think there are three other likely usage cases where this bug will manifest itself:

(1) A user may manually use a low resolution even on a computer with a video card and monitor that support higher resolutions, in order to cause text to appear larger (i.e. for accessibility).

(2) When upgrading or replacing their computers, many people keep their old monitors. Most monitors support resolutions of at least 1024x768, but they do not necessarily support higher resolutions with desirable color depth and refresh rate.

(3) When using a virtual machine, the "screen" of the virtual machine tends to be small when it is displayed inside a window on the host desktop. This is my situation. Specifically, I can verify that the Install Now button is below the bottom of the screen at (at least) the "Allocate drive space" step when partitioning manually (with ubiquity 2.5.22) with a screen resolution of 800x600.

It's easy to forget, but I think a lot of people still use 800x600 as the screen resolution on their desktop computers. That's the resolution I usually use for virtual machines' screens (as my host machine for virtualization is a laptop that normally runs with a resolution of 1366x768), and on some of my older Macintosh computers.

[Evan (ev)]

To be clear, I've kept a maximum 600 vertical pixels (as that seems to be common on netbooks) as the goal for the installer when running in the default session (just one panel, on the top).

Also, I failed to mention before that it's my intention to trim down that string to its former length, which will cause the advanced partitioning page to once again fit.

[Eliah Kagan (degeneracypressure)]

Will the newly trimmed-down string necessarily cause the advanced partitioning page to fit in all language translations?

(By the way, like Jeff, I have now verified that, when manual partitioning is not performed, each step of installer fits on a screen with 600 vertical pixels. The reason I had not reported this before was that, originally, I had increased the resolution from 800x600 to 1024x768 in order to see--and click on--the Install Now button. When I decreased the resolution back to 800x600 during the installation, the Forward button was below the screen. But now that I have tried a fresh installation where the resolution is never increased from 800x600 during the installation, I find that every other steps fits OK. Arguably Ubiquity should detect changes in screen resolution and re-render its interface accordingly, but I am not at all sure that the absence of that functionality is a bug. If someone thinks I should, I'll go ahead and file a bug for that feature request, though.)

[Eliah Kagan (degeneracypressure)]

Jeff has said that this bug no longer occurs for him, and I have confirmed this on my system. Should this bug be marked Fix Released now?

[Sam L. (somethinginteres)]

I installed i386 Ubuntu 11.04 today from the final release ISO and this bug still affected me. I had to ALT click to drag up the window and even then when the installer was downloading files I was unable to see progress. I couldn't resize the window manually either, as the pointer had changed to the circular one indicating activity. I had to "fly blind" and just watch for drive activity.

My netbook is an Asus eeePC [unsure of exact model number]
Resolution: 1024 x 600 (16:9)

[Rafael Belmonte (eaglescreen)]

This is affecting to the beta1 installer for oneiric on a 10 inches netbook.

[funny bunny (fbunny)]

This bug is still apparent in the release version of 11.10. i'am stuck on the "select a picture for your profile" window.

[Eliah Kagan (degeneracypressure)]

That is most unfortunate. :-(

As a workaround, can you access a menu for the window by pressing Alt+Spacebar and select Move, then move the window up so that its top border is higher than the top of the screen, rendering the controls at the bottom of the window accessible?

[funny bunny (fbunny)]

sry, i don't know. i used an external screen, but that ain't a solution.

[Eliah Kagan (degeneracypressure)]

Well, moving the window using the keyboard commands isn't a solution either--just a workaround.

[funny bunny (fbunny)]

let me add one thing: i think this might only happen, if ubuntu has detected webcam. due to the preview picture of the webcam the gui window is being resized and therefore you end up stuck on that screen..

[Rafael Belmonte (eaglescreen)]

This could be a duplicate o Bug #760645.

[Dimitri John Ledkov (xnox)]

@ eaglescreen, no, it's not.

[Stéphane Gourichon (stephane-gourichon-lpad)]

Hit this exact bug while installing Xubuntu 14.04 on a eeePc 701 that has a physical 800x600 screen.

I had to plug an external screen and enable it (xrandr or preference tool) to be able to see the buttons and click.

With that I discovered that the window was probably to tall since the beginning, but the bottom area with the progress dots wasn't that important. It really become a problem when

There are many bug reports involving installer window too big for screen. For example : #51442 #632320 #630363 #890983 #173392 #712848 #38442 . Perhaps some should be marked as duplicate to clean up the bug list.

[Stéphane Gourichon (stephane-gourichon-lpad)]

My mistake : the screen pixel count is not 800x600 but 800x480.
I have put a suggestion for a generic fix on #38442.
Comments welcome.

[Marcus Tomlinson (marcustomlinson)]

This release of Ubuntu is no longer receiving maintenance updates. If this is still an issue on a maintained version of Ubuntu please let us know.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for ubiquity (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]