GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 738789
gnome-initial-setup resets keyboard layout
Last modified: 2014-10-30 18:13:39 UTC
Installing Fedora 21 Alpha Workstation, in anaconda I picked the Dvorak keyboard layout, which was correctly used after installation. Then I ran a system update, and gnome-initial-setup started after the update. (Presumably it will instead start on first log-in in F21 Beta.) It asked me to choose my system's language, then on the next page it immediately reset my keyboard layout to US English and I had to pick Dvorak again, without being able to type properly.... Then that was it -- g-i-s opened up the getting started help and was done. It looks like there was literally no purpose in running g-i-s other than to reset my previous choice of language and keyboard layout, which I already picked in Anaconda. Why are we starting it at all? Maybe it makes sense for new user accounts, but definitely not the initial user....
Anaconda is not our ideal installer, so there is some redundancy if you are doing setup tasks in anaconda already. The point of g-i-s is to let you set up locale, keyboard, network, location, account and online accounts. Not just the keyboard.
(In reply to comment #1) > The point of g-i-s is to let you set up locale, keyboard, network, location, > account and online accounts. Not just the keyboard. Do we set up network, location, and account in existing user mode? I thought it was just online accounts. We obviously shouldn't reset the user's existing keyboard layout. I see no obvious reason that should be the case, other than perhaps the top keyboard layout simply being selected by default? And yeah, the Anaconda designs were separate and we had no input into them (even though I really tried hard), and if you set up an existing user account there, then gnome-initial-setup is a bit awkward. I ditched existing user mode entirely way back when, but Matthias recently brought it back for ~*~ reasons ~*~. It's useless, I agree.
Maybe existing user mode just needs to skip locale and keyboard layout. All major distros' installers take care of these already. (In reply to comment #1) > The point of g-i-s is to let you set up locale, keyboard, network, location, > account and online accounts. Not just the keyboard. The sequence of pages was locale -> keyboard layout -> done. I guess network was skipped because this is a desktop computer with a wired connection. I'm not sure why everything else was skipped.
if it skipped online accounts, that is a bug
(In reply to comment #4) > if it skipped online accounts, that is a bug It skipped Online Accounts. Some new comments from the Fedora bug: "I seeing pretty much the same: in Anaconda I chose English (US) language and Finnish + Finnish(classic) keyboard layouts. After booting up, in GDM there are three keyboards to choose from: Finnish (the default), Finnish(classic), and English (US) (I think it's ok since the system language is English (US) but not having it there would be no issue either, IMHO). When I log in for the first time, initially I see those three keyboard layouts as the available alternatives in gnome-shell's top bar, Finnish still being the default (so far so good). But then g-i-s starts showing the following screens: 1) Welcome - asks to select language, English (US) being the default, others shown are German, French, Chinese, Korean, etc (no Finnish) 2) Typing - English (US) is the default, others shown are Cameroon Multilingual (??) and four English variants (no Finnish), need to search for Finnish so that the default keyboard will be the one I already selected during installation. And after selecting it, the keyboard layout selection in the top bar of gnome-shell is gone. And if I would go with the g-i-s suggested default, I'd lose quick availability of both keyboard layouts I already chose in Anaconda. 3) Connect Your Online Accounts 4) You're all set!" So that guy did get Online Accounts.... "Oh, I selected German lang/keyb in g-i-s to see what happens, well nothing happened - g-i-s was in German but then the GNOME session was still in English. I had to log out / log in to have German in use, g-i-s did not suggest it." I think instead of worrying about these, we should just remove language and keyboard layout selection when running in existing user mode. These only make sense in new user mode.
(In reply to comment #5) > I think instead of worrying about these, we should just remove language and > keyboard layout selection when running in existing user mode. These only make > sense in new user mode. Sorry, that's completely wrong: these settings ARE useful when there is an existing user that was not created by the OS installer, but are never useful for the first user regardless of whether it was created by the OS installer or not (i.e. regardless of whether we are in existing user mode), as the every installer will surely set language and keyboard layout.
I haven't been able to reproduce the no-goa problem. When I run gnome-initial-setup --existing-user in the session, I get language-keyboard-goa-summary
(In reply to comment #7) > I haven't been able to reproduce the no-goa problem. When I run > gnome-initial-setup --existing-user in the session, I get > language-keyboard-goa-summary I can't be sure, but I think I figured it out: this was on my laptop, and I probably did not have my wi-fi hotspot up, so the laptop would have had no network connection and the goa page would have been skipped for good reason.
if there was no network connection, you should have gotten the g-i-s network page :-(
This bug got too confusing, but I think the commit below should address most of the problems here. Please file new bugs for any unresolved issue. commit a6b0132193d1c4031035d4d412285a488dfaf2a6 Author: Rui Matos <tiagomatos@gmail.com> Date: Thu Oct 30 17:58:16 2014 +0100 keyboard: Preserve system keyboard layouts If there are keyboard layouts already configured system wide we should keep and import them as user input sources. For simplicity we still only allow the user to choose one input source and in that case we'll use it as the default, i.e. the first. The first system layout, if it exists, is pre-selected in the chooser.