Friday, June 12, 2009

Ubuntu 9.10 is getting an installation slideshow

The Ubuntu-Doc mailing list just received word from Dylan McCall and the Ubiquity Slideshow Team that Ubiquity (the Ubuntu live CD's installer) is being retrofitted with a slideshow that will play during installation. This is something I've supported for a long time and good news for new users, but it likely won't help anyone else.

The slideshow is written in HTML and CSS, and uses a main page to embed the other ones. The README file for the code indicates that slides should be 700x420 in order to fit on displays of 800x600. Since the PlaySlideshow.sh file only contains "xdg-open URL," I can assume the slideshow will appear in the default browser for the system being installed.

I've done a video of the slideshow for you to watch: remember that it's a draft and Dylan is asking for assistance on this.

4 comments:

said...

Cool, thanks for the note, Daengbo :)

Shame that YouTube ate the pretty background, but the idea is to grab the alternate bg image from the current release and look awesome. It isn't just my crazy fascination with the colour brown speaking there.

As for the "likely won't help anyone else" part, this is probably accurate for now but I actually really hope the content can get to a point that it will! I'm hoping it can help out documenters and people doing support by (subtly) introducing end users to terms used around the desktop.

More importantly, I would love this to show what's new and what's cool with each release, maybe beyond the "main" repository, to everyone's benefit. If we are lucky I think 9.04 may find itself shipping with Blender 2.50 in the repositories, for example, and a fresh release of Pitivi. Two things absolutely deserving of a look.

Currently the slideshow is a bit heavily focused on documentation to the point that some people could easily lose interest, so feedback will really help that for sure. (So thanks for mentioning that!)

Oh, and the Javascript library I used really deserves mention somewhere, so I'll do it here: Transitions are thanks to the awesome "CrossFade Anything"! ( http://www.millstream.com.au/view/code/crossfade )

phiphi.g said...

I really like that,

But it has quite a lot of text.

I'd like to go back and forth in the presentation (in the final product).

I would like to see a "after-installation"-version of that, perhaps with links to additional information to the specific topics.

Have a nice day!

Leo said...

nice, but still no explanation on how to install ubuntu :/
Many new users don't know how to make the dual boot, and don't know how the partitioning tool works.
The first time I installed ubuntu, I had to be helped by a friend of mine..

Anonymous said...

i have to say i agree with Leo. the first time i installed ubuntu i had the whole partitioning help page open on my cell phone n was reading off that to partition the disk. first time users from windows background will find it difficult to perform manual partitioning. other than that i think i like the slideshow, however it did remind me a bit of the windows xp installation, which wasnt pleasing.

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