Progress report as we approach 18.04 Beta 2

Run the live installer and see how it works on your system without installing. Or improve your odds of success by waiting for beta2 to come out.

Would it be beneficial to reinstall from the second beta to refresh any customizations and give you guys clean feedback without any possible cruft from previous files or what not?

Are there any specific things you want people to play around with to see that it all works together properly? I’m trying to help but mostly I’ve been trying to use everything as I normally would and report if I run into anything. If there’s some better way I can help as a non-programmer I’m open to it.

Some tests that are really useful for us are:

  • Does everything in the Software Boutique install?
  • Do upgrades from 16.04 and 17.10 work?
  • If you choose a minimal install, are there any stray applications left behind? Is there anything pre-configured that assumes a full install?

Testing the above in a VM is fine.

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Hi Watford,

I did just that and don’t have any problems as there are constant daily updates anyway!. :smiley:

Thanks, I’ll try some of these

Does everything in the Software Boutique install?

User reporting issues:

Software Boutique

  • Etcher - installation does not work
  • Virtualbox - installation does not work

Thread

VirtualBox is fixed. Etcher worked fine for me?

Etcher didn't work here either. I've updated minutes ago, rebooted the VM(GNOME Boxes) and tried to install Etcher, error:

Hello! I picked up a new-to-me Dell Inspiron 64 bit laptop - welcome to the not-as-distant future! I passed on my i386 macbook to a coworker and we reinstalled 18.04 beta 01 - troubles with the grub for i386, and the same troubles with boutique installs of Opera and Spotify. I’m not entirely sure how I worked around it last time, but I imagine you would like to know it’s still not installing out of the box.

VirtualBox and Etcher - installation from Software Boutique works now, after latest updates

I can definitely test some upgrades from 16.04 LTS and I think I still have the ISO for 17.10 somewhere. Is there a logging method to capture any data or are we to use the tried and true ‘worked for me’ method?

Just upgraded from 16.04 to 18.04 beta 2. Went well, except on reboot “System problem detected” - turns our /lib/systemd/system-generators/lvm2-activation-generator gets a SIGSERV crash. Encrypted container with lvm2 containing root and swap partitions still all get mounted and work. It has been affecting 5 people so far on launchpad/bugs but the report got rejected because of the coredump being corrupted. I’m going to try to report it afresh, and hope that my coredump isn’t rejected…
– This probably works fine on a new install, and is probably fixable (but I don’t know how…)

Another problem (bigger for me) is that the keyboard layout can only be shown in flags. This can be hard for colourblind people, I want just the iso 2-letter abbreviation to be shown as in the years before gnome3. This seems no longer to be an option. It is an option on XFCE (xfce4-panel), and on LXDE/LXQt (lxpanel/lxqt-panel), but apparently no longer on mate-panel (unless it’s an upgrade bug, and it works on a fresh install).

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Hi, you actually can display keyboard layout in letters. This behavior is configurable. The most user-friendly way to do this is via dconf-editor:

  1. install dconf-editor;
  2. the key you are looking for is /org/mate/peripherals/keyboard/indicator/show-flags.

Regards

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I don’t have a /org/mate/peripherals entry… But through a search I found it’s /org/mate/desktop/peripherals/keyboard/indicator/show-flags!

Oh, that is a huge relief! It would be great of course if this was to be configurable in the applet itself, or even in mate-tweak. @Wimpy, would it be possible to add this toggle to mate-tweak??

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Sorry, my typo there, I missed a “desktop” section.
Glad that helped you. I personally prefer letters over flags too. I think letters fit the style of panel and other indicators better.

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Maybe that’s even a better default setting! Think how many people have a US key layout on their keyboards, but would really not like to see a US flag on their desktop a lot of the time…

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Thank you ! Flag is ok, “letters” are better (for me) :smile:

I’ll change the keyboard layout indicator to the text labels.

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Was there a recently fixed bug where the Indicators were patched?

I mentioned some issues with the applets on my panel before and was about to try to make s short video of the issue in action but after an update that issue seems to have gone away!

For historical purposes, the issue was when changing the layouts, from one to a saved layout the applets would crash or disappear when reverting back to the saved layout and present with missing applets. Was just chalking it up to development in the background–we’re still in beta after all–when it occurred to me it could be a Mate-Tweak bug so I wanted to report it.

Seems to be gone now though, so hooray! :slight_smile:

EDIT: Also, a minor papercut and a possible bit of ignorance on my part. Is there any way to show a blinking cursor on the new login screen? As it is now there’s no indication that the keyboard is already on where it needs to be to type in the password.

Secondly and somewhat related, I am a single user most of the time so I was wondering how does the new login screen work with more than one user? If I wanted to add a user would their name just show up on the login screen or would a new menu become exposed to allow shifting from one user to another? In the old login screen the listbox made it obvious that you would click here to get a new user or to change a user. How does this work with our new login screen?

I have some problems with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS MATE.

Visual group of problems:

  1. I installed human-theme package on it, and it has gray/silver color (#a5a5a2), not standard Ubuntu's orange (#cf8a31). Problem exists since Ubuntu 17.10 and was reported to launchpad as bug 1721955.
  2. Text selection in dialog windows have low contrast.
    Here "A terminal emulator for the MATE desktop" is selected with Ctrl+A, but visually its difficult to determine that it is selected. I did not reported this as bug yet. And here too:
  3. Keyboard LED indicator have low contrast on light themes (see bug 1728715)
  4. mate-welcome has low contrast on Radiant-MATE theme: (it is bug 1762024)

And other problems:

  1. I tried to get fixed the well known bug 1720364 with keyboard layout switching (two layouts, switched by Ctrl+Shift) by creating my own PPA.
  2. Problems with Pluma plugins - see bug 1723259, bug 1743132, bug 1743133, bug 1743134, bug 1743136.

@Wimpy, please ensure than text-styled keyboard layout indicator will have enough contrast (not as in bug 1728711).