[Desktop 12.10 Topic] The future of third-party driver installation

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Martin Pitt wrote on 18/04/12 08:14:
> ...
> 
> * We install some drivers (like Broadcom wifi) straight from
> Ubiquity now, which certainly makes sense for devices where there
> is no free alternative.

"Ubuntu uses third-party software to display Flash, MP3 and other
media, and to work with some wireless hardware." I wrote that sentence
in Ubiquity, but now we need to be more specific.

A team is working right now on letting you reinstall Ubuntu with
exactly the same software you had installed before. To do that, you
will need to sign in and download the inventory of software you had
installed before.

To sign in and download anything, you will need to have an Internet
connection. Unless you have Ethernet, mobile broadband, etc, this
means you need a working wi-fi driver.

You usually won't know that you don't have a working wi-fi driver,
unless Ubiquity tells you. So it needs to tell you specifically, "You
need to install this wireless driver to complete this task".

> For the others (e. g. NVidia) we pop up a notification and offer to
> install them. I'd like to walk through the current UI and discuss
> how this could be made more steamlined and less confusing (e. g.
> for NVidia it can potentially offer 6 different drivers for you!)
> 
> * We might consider merging the jockey UI functionality, which is 
> mostly a shallow GUI around "install that package" now) into 
> software-center, control-center, or something similar to the codec 
> installer. I'd again appreciate if someone from the design team 
> could participate in that (hello Matthew!).
> 
> ...

Here's a design I prepared earlier: Jockey would become an "Additional
Drivers" tab in a "Software & Updates" panel of System Settings.
<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareAndUpdatesSettings#drivers>

(I need to update that design to incorporate feedback from Alex
Chiang. <https://bugs.launchpad.net/jockey/+bug/660669/comments/2>)

Questions to consider when evaluating that or any other design:
<https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-art/2012-January/013472.html>

- -- 
mpt
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/

iEYEARECAAYFAk+RlYIACgkQ6PUxNfU6eco/jgCdFce9s61qsXL3L+lfpkTaVkRf
p10Amwa+zVhilNnURbW5QuQs/MEa4XbF
=KKM6
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----