Colony 3 report

[Ivan Krstic]

Hi,

I just got a chance to plop Colony 3 on an older HP XW4100 graphics
workstation. It was a bit of a bumpy ride.

- Selecting Croatian language in d-i was a dead end, since it couldn't
recognize the standard Croatian keyboard layout from hitting the
appropriate keys, and when trying to access the full keyboard layout
list, it would throw an error. More annoyingly, going back to the
language selection and selecting English did not resolve the keyboard
situation - I was not offered any English keyboard layouts. I suspect
the installer still kept track of my choice of Croatian, because trying
to *again* go back to the language selection screen, Croatian was
selected, even though I picked English last time. I had to reboot to
reenter the installer and select English right away.

- The NTFS partition resize operation doesn't have a progress bar of any
type. It echoes percentage done on one of the ttys, but the actual
installer screen is just blue until the operation completes. That
strikes me as incredibly unnerving for new users, and potentially
disastrous: because there is absolutely nothing on the screen, not even
a 'Please wait and do not reboot your computer' type message, the user
might conclude the installation froze and reboot his machine mid-resize.
I noticed there was a 'Resize /part and partition automatically' option
that I didn't try (/part? What's /part?), so perhaps this works better
than my manual resizing through the partition editor.

- The actual NTFS partition resizing strikes me as very unintuitive.
There is no indication I can resize a NTFS partition by hitting enter
when positioned on its 'Size' parameter, and when I do, it presents a
dialog about needing to write changes before resizing, but it sounds
like I've already picked the new size I want.

- I like the new progress bar for package installation after the first
boot. However, it eventually froze on a specific package (xserver-xorg,
I believe) and wouldn't budge. I had to kill the task from the console
and finish installing packages by hand. Because I'm not certain where it
errored out, didn't collect a log, and didn't think to write it down at
4 in the morning, I will repeat the installation and post again with
this information.

- The monitor's capabilities were misdetected. It's a Sony SDM X202 20"
flat panel; I had to add HorizSync and VertRefresh information to
xorg.conf manually before I could get anything above 800x600.

Once the system installed:

- In System -> Preferences -> About me, the 'Help' button doesn't do
anything.

- Right clicking on the gnome panel and clicking 'Translate this
application' launches firefox to a launchpad page which errors out
(launchpad system error).

- Various text throughout the system, including the Firefox home page,
still refers to Hoary. I assume this is known.

- System -> Administration -> Services lists the two logging services as
'klogd' and 'sysklogd'. The latter should be 'syslogd'.

- When closed, the same 'Services' tool throws an error dialog: Failed
to run services-admin as user root, child terminated with 207 status.

Finally, from the we're-all-usability-experts-now department, I think
the default firefox home page is pointless: way too much text that
people won't read. I'd prefer it was replaced with a pretty splash page
with two links on it: Ubuntu on the Web, and About Ubuntu. The latter
could then lead to the text-heavy page we have in place now. I use
about:blank as my home page, but would gladly have stayed on the default
home page that Ubuntu ships were it just a pretty splash page.

As I mentioned above, I'll reinstall later today and see if the freeze
reoccurs.

Cheers,
-IK