Ubuntu should have a better method of selecting the keyboard layout

Bug #9520 reported by Matt Zimmerman
132
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
kbd-chooser (Ubuntu)
Fix Released
Medium
Matthias Urlichs

Bug Description

Creating a bug for this, since a decision was made at the kickoff meeting, and a
number of bugs can be made duplicates of this one.

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Matt Zimmerman (mdz) wrote :

*** Bug 7929 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

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Matt Zimmerman (mdz) wrote :

*** Bug 8285 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

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Matt Zimmerman (mdz) wrote :

*** Bug 8337 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

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Matt Zimmerman (mdz) wrote :

*** Bug 9752 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

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Matt Zimmerman (mdz) wrote :

*** Bug 8836 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

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Matt Zimmerman (mdz) wrote :

*** Bug 9822 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

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Matt Zimmerman (mdz) wrote :

*** Bug 10190 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

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Matt Zimmerman (mdz) wrote :

*** Bug 12086 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

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Matt Zimmerman (mdz) wrote :

*** Bug 12172 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

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Matt Zimmerman (mdz) wrote :

*** Bug 12516 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

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Matt Zimmerman (mdz) wrote :

To all of you interested in this effort, there is a installer environment available:

ftp://netz.smurf.noris.de/vmlinuz
ftp://netz.smurf.noris.de/initrd.gz

You can boot these with grub using, for example:

title Ubuntu, installer testing
root (hd0,0)
kernel /home/me/vmlinuz vga=normal ramdisk_size=65536 root=/dev/rd/0 rw --
initrd /home/me/initrd.gz
savedefault
boot

(appended to /boot/grub/menu.lst)

Revision history for this message
Recai Oktaş (roktas) wrote :

I've just tested the new keyboard chooser and found it great for new users. It
successfully detected a Turkish F layout[1] after a few key pressing. Here is
the chooser menu presented when I selected Turkish as the installation language
(sketched in English):

  Turkish Q layout
  Find out by pressing keys
  Select from a list

Just a suggestion for further work, could we list all the relevant keyboard
layouts for the selected language? For example:

  Turkish Q layout
  Turkish F layout
  Find out by pressing keys
  Select from a list

I think it is not so trivial for the moment, so I'm just noting this for future.

[1] http://www.classykeyboards.com/datacal/turkish-f-layout.htm

Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

*** Bug 12247 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

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Daniel Stone (daniels) wrote :

*** Bug 12794 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Revision history for this message
Matthias Urlichs (smurf) wrote :

At the moment, the selector in the beginning just presents the default selection.

I'll have to look into offering more than one alternative there; this is
necessary in any case, since the selection method I use can't distinguish
between some keyboards (e.g. German dead-key-or-not variants).

Revision history for this message
Daniel Stone (daniels) wrote :

*** Bug 12657 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

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Martin Pitt (pitti) wrote :

Just tested the image on a German PC-105 QWERTZ keyboard with several possible
keystroke paths, all worked fine AFAICS.

Revision history for this message
Matthias Urlichs (smurf) wrote :

There is now an additional dialog one can use to verify the selected keyboard's
correctness.

Revision history for this message
David Balažic (xerces8) wrote :

In ubuntu 5.04, to proceed past the kezboard selection, on has to select and
'click' (press ENTER) on the name of the keyboard layout.

I find a separate option like "Next" or "Proceed" more logical, especially since
the other choices are named after the action that they cause :
- "Test the layout..." -> goes into a test screen
- "Choose from list" -> allows you to choose from a list
- "German" -> ????

Revision history for this message
Trouilliez vincent (vincent-trouilliez-modulonet) wrote :

> In ubuntu 5.04, to proceed past the kezboard selection, on has to select and
> 'click' (press ENTER) on the name of the keyboard layout.
>
> I find a separate option like "Next" or "Proceed" more logical

I fully agree with this, I find that pressing "Enter" on the layout name after
chosing it, is very un-intuitive. One would think that pressing this button
twice would take you back to the layout list/choser, and that to accept a
selected keyboard layout, you would have an "ok"/"proceed"/"next"/"continue"
button or something, like you have everywhere else in the installer.

Revision history for this message
Matt Zimmerman (mdz) wrote :

This has been working quite well for a while now and this bug can be closed

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