Hello! I’ve asked this question on askubuntu, however I was redirected to pose this question here, as it is a more appropriate place for it:
Following the announcement of the new Ubuntu installer application based on Google’s Flutter, a few of our sight-challenged members (in our Ubuntu CZ/SK community) has raised an important question. Will the new install wizard support (or be supported by) Orca? Right now, Ubuntu is among the most disability-friendly Linux distribution, lagging just slightly behind the likes of macOS. Our vision-impaired friends are proud to be able to install and maintain their Linux boxes without the need of sighted-person’s assistance and they would really like it to stay so.
Unfortunatelly, according to them, Orca doesn’t really work with anything but GTK+ applications. Is there any contiguency plan for sightless or otherwise disabled users? Possibly an alternative image with Ubiquiti or added support for screen reading with Flutter?
We contributed a11y support to the Flutter Linux shell. This shell is actually GTK and I’m pretty sure that it would still utilize Orca. @robert.ancell did the work and could confirm.
Full a11y support is a requirement for the new installer, we would appreciate testing when the time comes. Thanks!
The Flutter linux shell recently added support for accessibility. This is implemeted using ATK, so should expose much the same as any other GTK app. I tested it with Orca and accerciser and had elements being read out and could see and interact with the Flutter elements. This should work automatically when using the Flutter from the beta channel.
I’m however not an expert in a11y, and look forward to some real-world feedback on this feature. The installer will be a great test case to make sure that a11y support is rock-solid. Please file any issues you find and we’ll do our best to fix them quickly!
Thank you very much for the quick response. I will relay the information to our sightless friend in the czechoslovakian community and come back to you with any issues that might surface.
I’m a bit scared
It reminds me a similar attempt (of which I appreciate the intent ) that is having a bed side effect on Ubuntu 20.10 and at the moment also 21.04:
The installer expects to find an EFI partition on a computer with BIOS…
This issue doesn’t affect system-upgrade or installation erasing the entire hard drive (in this case EFI partition is automatically created).
But in any other case installation fails, unless you are aware of this problem… and most people don’t really expect this.
And even expecting this, workarounds can be difficult.
I’m afraid that if all the efforts are going on a new installer, there will not be a fix for the upcoming 21.04. And if things go long, even 21.10 could be affected by this bad bug.
If I’m wrong, I’ll be the happiest person on the planet
I’ve seen images disappear on the snapcraft forum too. This coincided with a change to the AWS bucket configuration. I think you’ll need to speak to IS @oSoMoN
Downloaded ISO and started install but the install window ‘Keyboard layout’ is empty (Because I have an Italian keyboard?) and also pressing ‘continue’ has no effect
Yes, because the new installer is still very much in development, it’s not ready for general consumption yet. But if you feel adventurous and want to provide feedback, you can download a canary ISO, where the new installer is the default.
@corradoventu - looks like at the time you installed, the Jammy archive was unhappy as some of the packages failed to download.
E: Package 'efibootmgr' has no installation candidate
E: Package 'grub-efi-amd64' has no installation candidate
E: Unable to locate package grub-efi-amd64-signed
E: Package 'shim-signed' has no installation candidate
We’ve got an impish version of the daily-canary that you might be interested in.
@corradoventu - the tests are useful. Your log helped point out jammy vs impish differences. And I appreciate that you tarred up the entire log directory, that made it easy to diagnose.
do you think it is safe to install in a dedicated partition?
Even production installers advise you to back up important data before use, and this one isn’t production yet . But I think you can do this, but please be careful which partitions you agree to format.
Before I said yes I ran thru an install with real hardware, testing a real dual-boot (linux / linux) case. I ran into the following caveats:
I also ran into the same apt issue you did, but with the impish image. I suspect offline install is a little broken and will look into it.
to work around this, I setup networking. I had to manually ubuntu-drivers install in the install environment, then things were fine.
ubuntu-desktop-installer/subiquity cannot yet cope with repartitioning scenarios like resizing a partition or even creating a new one in free space, so you may have to use a partitioning tool ahead of time to work around this. I used the ‘Disks’ utility, which is available in the installer live environment. I then used the installer Manual partitioning steps to pick up the existing EFI partition, and install to the new partition I created.
Try install in preallocated partition on nvme disk
snap:ubuntu-desktop-installer stable/ubuntu-22.04 133
i stopped install because last screen ‘Write changes to disk’ does not specify the partitions to be formatted.
Problems?
screen Updates and other software
does not propose Updates and other third-party software
screen Installation type
does not propose ‘Install Ubuntu alongside them’
screen Allocate disk space
does not show device for boot
seems not recognising the swap partition existing on a different disk of same PC and automatically assumed as swap from Ubiquity
note: same problems also trying install on SSD disk partition sda2
) that is having a bed side effect on Ubuntu 20.10 and at the moment also 21.04:
