Which button should I click?
February 1, 2008 8:07 am GeneralI crashed my laptop hard (while standing in front of a room full of people awaiting my presentation, ew) when plugged into a projector and clicking Fn-F8 -CRT/LCD) a few times. I kind of suspected I might – I have used xrandr previously to adjust the resolution of the screen to 1024×768 (from 1200×800) before plugging in the CRT, but since upgrading to Ubuntu 7.10 that hasn’t worked, and there seems to be better support for multiple screens… anyway, crash, bang, slink off stage and let the next guy go first, I ended up doing my presentation on a spare windows partition.
When I booted back up, something was wrong with my X config. It fell back into some kind of failsafe mode, the keyboard turned from azerty to qwerty, and there were some other quirks. On logging in to GNOME, I
got this dialog:
Now, which button should I press?
February 1st, 2008 at 9:08 am
This is indeed a big bug. I never understood the need for this one. If there’s a gnome settings, then you must use it, I don’t see any reason to no using it.
More : it seems to me that when you logon in gdm, once the “username” is typed, gdm should automatically switch to the keyboard settings of this user. It’s rather annoying to type your password in a different layout than the one you are used to.
February 1st, 2008 at 9:20 am
yes, I had this insane dialog show up a few times too…
February 1st, 2008 at 9:28 am
I’ve also hit that annoying dialog. If I use xnest to login with a different user and afterwards log in the usual way through gdm to that same account, I always get greeted by that dialog. I would also suggest to use the gnome settings since those are the settings you probably want to use.
February 1st, 2008 at 9:40 am
I love the way it’s got nice HIG-compliant verb-type button labels, which means that at some point someone who knew what they were doing actually spent some time on this horror.
– Chris
February 1st, 2008 at 10:05 am
I see several issues there : first, the message doesn’t let the user know which setting is which, and even then, the choice is hard to make for a normal user.
That being said and to answer the question : I suggest you click the right button! (pun intended)
February 1st, 2008 at 10:25 am
Also notice the “the the” in the message which should be corrected, unless this message is removed.
February 1st, 2008 at 10:25 am
Ploum: in this case, the correct button was the “Use X settings” button, which was the “fr latin9” setting. When the X server had fallen back to failsafe mode, the GNOME settings were right, but the X settings were wrong. But then (somehow) GNOME aligned itself with X, and when I corrected xorg.conf (manually, in a text editor, ugh), I needed to re-align GNOME and X settings by choosing “Use X settings”.
The problem is, as someone pointed out, there’s no clue in the buttons which one is which.
February 1st, 2008 at 10:32 am
I’d say always use the X setting. The Gnome keyboard has a tendency to mess up keyboard layouts.
As a distributor, I’ve stopped counting the bugs due to this very dialog when people click on the “Use Gnome Settings” button.
If there were a way to completely disable Gnome’s keyboard {h,m}angling, I would do so for the sake of our users.
Cheers 🙂
February 1st, 2008 at 10:44 am
I’ve had this dialog appear several times in the past, and in my experience, your keyboard layout can end up broken no matter which option you choose.
February 1st, 2008 at 11:14 am
Pretty uncool for someone who neither knows what GNOME or X is. 🙁
February 1st, 2008 at 11:21 am
I wish these things were a priority. Gnome sure is not ready for a mass market if it kills your settings and shows horrible dialogs like that afterwards *sigh*
February 1st, 2008 at 11:22 am
indeed, this dialog has bugged me too sometimes..
switching the layout _after_ typing the username is kinda sucky for me aswell, as i have to select a layout for X in that case anyway, or else i have to type ‘baye’ before my system switched from qwerty to german qwertz 😉
maybe i should get a new nick ;>
February 1st, 2008 at 11:38 am
Surely this dialog could be replaced by a checkbox “Use system settings” in the keyboard capplet.
Is there a bug in the GNOME bugzilla?
February 1st, 2008 at 11:38 am
As a person responsible for that dialog, I am happy to tell you it is gone in 2.22 😉 Yes, that dialog was not really well made – but instead of fixing, I just dropped it – it is really better for everybody.
In your case, chosing “Keep GNOME settings” might be better I guess.
February 1st, 2008 at 11:47 am
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=358048
February 1st, 2008 at 11:53 am
I’d say click the cross in the upper-right.
February 1st, 2008 at 11:54 am
Nonono, please no more checkboxes. Registry key maybe, but I thought I was using gnome _because_ I wanted it to handle my setings?
February 1st, 2008 at 12:58 pm
I saw some blog about that dialog a lot of time ago… may be a year. Please fix those things faster!!! GNOME rocks!
February 1st, 2008 at 1:06 pm
“…I ended up doing my presentation on a spare windows partition…”
Sigh.
People rag on me for it sometimes, but this sort of fun ‘n’ games is exactly why, whenever I’m doing a presentation, I do it on Windoze. A Rob Bradford and I spent a couple of hours going nuts at the last GUADEC trying to get the Linux laptop to work with the projector in the big theater without mis-proportioning the image, cutting things off, etc., etc., and to no avail.
February 1st, 2008 at 1:15 pm
Lefty: Glad you noticed that bit too.
I know several free software people (including a couple of people in Mozilla) who give presentations for a living, who will not ever try to do it on Linux. Every conference I’ve been to, there are problems with modelines, refresh rates, screen resolutions, colour balance or some other such issue.
I’d really like to have the confidence that I can go Fn F8 and just have the bloody thing work.
Dave.
February 1st, 2008 at 4:28 pm
Yeah that one annoys me because I configure right-Alt to be compose. Forunately I rarely logout. One should remove this KDE-ism once for all.
February 1st, 2008 at 9:59 pm
i reported this one a while back on GNOME Bugzilla and was referred to http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=358048
February 1st, 2008 at 10:05 pm
I have this problem from time to time when I move my home directory to a new machine, say if I am switching computers. I simply use the GNOME settings, because they are what I went after and configured anyway.
February 18th, 2008 at 10:09 pm
sure this dialog is ugly and nobody knows where to click!
but, when you use a centrally hosted home dir and login from several hosts with different keyboard layouts, Gnome asks you which setting you prefer (I guess?)