logo and icons in the installer boot splash are distorted

I don't think we'll be able to get this perfect; trying to do image scaling in gfxboot is, well, unlikely to produce good results, and a bad idea anyway (see below). The best I think we can do is to try to pick the VESA mode that's closest in shape to what gfxboot's monitorsize primitive returns. I'm not sure that that equates to actual native panel resolution on laptops, though; figuring that out involves a whole load of chipset-specific code that gfxboot simply doesn't have.

Without knowing the native panel resolution, there's no way for gfxboot-theme-ubuntu to guess what scaling the hardware is applying to the video mode and reverse it, not that this would be a good idea anyway; some hardware will simply centre a small video mode in the available screen space, whereas some hardware will scale it. We have no way to know what the hardware is going to do here.

Note that this is completely different from things like widescreen themes for xsplash. With things like xsplash themes, we can assume that X has picked a good resolution for the monitor (and X has a *lot* of chipset-specific code to try to do this), so we need different versions of the theme to account for the fact that different resolutions have different shapes if you assume square pixels. That isn't the case here - the problem is one of trying to select a good resolution in the first place, because we don't have all the usual infrastructure.

What we might also be able to do is to get the physical monitor size from a DDC probe (we're already doing the probe; it's just a matter of getting some different information from it - byte 15h is the maximum horizontal size in cm, and byte 16h is vertical) and try to pick a screen size based on that. We'd still be limited to VESA modes, though, and the same caveats about hardware scaling apply.

I'd appreciate a photo of what you're currently seeing so that I can make sure I'm taking the right things into account.

Here is what I see on my reasonably shaped laptop screen.

I understand that this is not a straightforward fix, but it is the VERY first thing new users see, and sets a low expectation about quality, therefore is extremely important.

Thanks

As in discussion with sabdfl, will approach proper design of this area for 10.10.

This is fine with me if it's fine with sabdfl. I'm going to upload the one soft-and-squishy bit of the problem that I'd managed to deal with already (adding a monitordimensions keyword to the gfxboot language), since I might as well.

FWIW, my current thought is that the most practical way to address this would probably after all be to provide pre-distorted versions of the logo for 16:9, the way we used to do for usplash. It's still not trivial and certainly wouldn't be perfect, and it may well be that we can achieve something much more polished using grub2/gfxterm in lucid+1 (that would be a significant feature development project, although one I think would be worthwhile for a variety of reasons).

This bug was fixed in the package gfxboot - 3.3.39-0ubuntu4

---------------
gfxboot (3.3.39-0ubuntu4) lucid; urgency=low

  * 08_monitordimensions.dpatch: Add a new "monitordimensions" keyword,
    returning the physical width and height of the monitor in cm
    (LP: #536692).
  * Stop building for lpia.
 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Wed, 31 Mar 2010 17:54:06 +0100