Please use a dialog instead of libnotify for hard disk failure warnings

[Dylan McCall]

When gnome-disk-utility detects a failing hard drive, it uses libnotify to warn the user. It assumes that the notification will look and behave like one of notification-daemon's notifications: a simple, unobtrusive popup with a single action button that says Examine. With notify-osd, this is not the case. Instead, we get one of notify-osd's fallback alert dialogs, and many of these dialogs appear at once (stacked on each other). This is not optimal. Instead, gnome-disk-utility should display its own dialog box.
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Architecture: amd64
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" - Release amd64 (20110427.1)
NonfreeKernelModules: fglrx
Package: gnome-disk-utility 2.32.1-0ubuntu4
PackageArchitecture: amd64
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_CA:en
 LANG=en_CA.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/zsh
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-10.44-generic 2.6.38.7
Tags: natty running-unity
Uname: Linux 2.6.38-10-generic x86_64
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
UserGroups: adm admin cdrom dialout lpadmin plugdev sambashare

[Daniel Manrique (roadmr)]

Hi Dylan,

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. It would be helpful to have some more detailed information about your system. To this end I'd like to ask you to please execute the following command, as it will automatically gather debugging information, in a terminal (press ctrl-alt-t to open a terminal):
apport-collect 807797
When reporting bugs in the future please use apport by using 'ubuntu-bug' and the name of the package affected. You can learn more about this functionality at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReportingBugs.

Once we have that information I'll be able to better route your report to the appropriate developers.

Thanks!

[Dylan McCall (dylanmccall)]

apport information

[Dylan McCall (dylanmccall)]

Thanks for the quick comment, roadmr. Apport stuff should be coming in a second, and just to clarify I am running Ubuntu 11.04 with the stock Unity session. This bug report is about a general UX issue that should affect every Ubuntu system equally, not how it is behaving on my system in particular. Still, could be helfpul :)

I'm also attaching a screenshot of the notification with notification-daemon (what gnome-disk-utility imagines its notification looks like) and with notify-osd (what it actually looks like).

[Daniel Manrique (roadmr)]

Thanks Dylan, the screenshot really helps clarify the issue and your suggestion.

I'll mark this as a Wishlist report, as it is a "request to add a new feature to one of the programs in Ubuntu".

Since gnome-disk-utility is part of the GNOME project, it might help to speed things along if you have the time to file a bug report upstream requesting this feature. Find information on how to do that for GNOME programs here:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Upstream/GNOME

If you do, please report back here the bug number in GNOME so we can add a task to track it.

Thanks again for your report and I hope this feature gets implemented.

---
Ubuntu Bug Squad volunteer triager
http://wiki.ubuntu.com/BugSquad

[Dylan McCall (dylanmccall)]

Thanks, Daniel. I sent it upstream, over here: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=654301