Others category

Dell seems to be ignoring this in Ideastorm.
http://www.ideastorm.com/article/show/62549/coreboot_formerly_LinuxBIOS_instead _of_proprietary_BIOS

Maybe Canonical could bring it up at their next meeting or something.

Benefits:
# 100% Free Software (GPL), no royalties, no license fees!
# Fast boot times (3 seconds from power-on to Linux console)
# Runs in 32-Bit protected mode almost from the start

Coreboot link:
http://www.coreboot.org/Welcome_to_coreboot

Let's first examine some facts...

Number of employees from Wikipedia:
---------------------------------------------------------
Canonical: 130
RedHat: 2200
Novell: 4100

While this is not necessarily 100% accurate of how many linux contributors each company employs, it provides a good hint.


I recently read an article here about kernel contribution:
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/linuxkerneldevelopment.php
-----------------------------------------------------------
RehHat: # changes 9,351 or 11.2%
Novell: # changes 7,385 or 8.9% (up from 3.6% last year)
The lowest number of changes by a company in that article was 285 and canonical didn't even make the list.

I understand that canonical is not a hardware company and as such may not contribute to add support for additional hardware, but it can still contribute. THis also is not isolated to the linux kernel.


Canonical employs only a couple of people to work on gnome. Most of the people are employed by Redhat/Novell. Similarly for KDE, this is likely Novell/Trolltech.

I imagine the situation is the same for core applications that are relied on by the average user.

[....]

Were from me a very good surprise on how successful were those Netbooks easily available on sale with Linux OEM - finally! =)

But well, since i were Ubuntu user since almost 4 years ago, and as i'm seeing Ubuntu as the most popular Linux distribution, and as well with the most active community, for me were a bit weird Asus-Eeepc and Acer-AspireOne coming respectivelly with Xandros and Linpus, which both seems to be rpm-based (fedora/mandriva/suse)

Of course i know there were websites explaining how can we replace Xandros and Linpus with Ubuntu, but would be more interesting an official and easier way about how to do it - and even helping Ubuntu (and Ubuntu-based, like gOS) being the most popular Linux OEM among all of those netbooks, as well as OEM on all hardware possible on sale.

I think it would be useful if nautilus could show preview of gimp's xcf files in thumbnails like it does with jpeg and png files

There are some well integrated and simple to use possibilities to contribute to ubuntu, but they are in different places, and too "good hidden" from a common user.
I would pick up this all to the "Contribute to Ubuntu" Wizard, with the follow steps/items:
1. "First Step"
"The First Step is just using or trying Ubuntu and it's probably done by You ;)"
2. "Hardware Testing" (actually reachable under "System/Administration/Hardware Testing")
with a short description and the run button
3. "Application Use Statistics" (actually reachable under "System/Administration/Software Sources/Statistics")
also with a short description and the related check box
4. "Help Translate"
with a short description and where it is to find:
a) the menu "Help/Translate this application" in the most applications
b) link to the launchpad "Rosetta"
5. "Help Fix Bugs"
with a short description, where it is to find:
a) the menu "Help/Report a Problem" in the most applications
b) link to the launchpad "Malone"
...And the option "Install Applications with Debugging Information (dbg-packages) automatically":
it's new one, if you select this option, you always will get dbg-packages for new applications, if available, and (maybe as a second option) all yet installed will be replaced. For example the "nautilus" package will be replaced with the "nautilus-dbg" package. It can be very usefull, if you have errors you cannot reproduce, and installation of the debugging version doesn't make unfortunately any sense after that...
6. "How Can I Contribute Else"
any further information with related links

The wizard runner can be placed in the "System" menu.

Many Linux users run dual-boot setups and have NTFS partitions.

This is an unimportant low-priority idea, that although could be nice to eventually have.

There should be a defragmenter tool in the repository that can defragment FAT32 and NTFS volumes.

This is not my idea, is from willwill100 on DevianArt:

He/she make this mockup for Ubuntu and I think is one of the best ever created (my opinion).

He/she doesn't know that I publish his/her ideas here... But I think that if Ubuntu has this Look and Feel, Ubuntu will be better (or best :P)

http://willwill100.deviantart.com/art/Interpid-Ibex-Mockup-Part-1-93584571

As always, excuse my poor english.

Nautilus only has one dedicated hacker (Christian Neumair) although it's a crucial part of Gnome. Still studying, it's difficult for him to give as much attention as he would like to every help request, and new hackers.
More genreally, in the context of Gnome 3.0, Gnome needs at least another Nautilus hacker (a Gnome hacker who would specialize into Nautilus' internals)

With dell's new netbook due to come out soon, it is extremely important for the growth of linux that they provide honest information about it. They shouldn't say something like:
"The linux option is cheaper than the xp option. However, it can not run most commercial programs" After reading that, why would anybody choose it? It should say something along the lines of:
"Linux is an open source alternative to Windows. This means it is completely free for anybody to use it in any way. It can do almost anything that you can do with windows. It cannot run windows software, but there are many free alternatives that do the same thing included with it. It comes with a word processor (That can handle .doc), a web browser, an email application, and many other utilities. It is also very easy to install new software, without the risk of viruses. In fact, there are virtually no viruses that can harm linux..."

This explanation is fairly unbiased, and all true, and provides a much more pleasing alternative. However, dell will not do write such a description because of the pressure of microsoft. We need to push dell to write the truth if linux is ever going to be common among everyday users.

The world clock in Ubuntu seems to be behind times little bit.
It shows the city Mumbai by the name of Bombay. Bombay got renamed in 1999. So as you can see the Clock isn't lagging by much!
Also many Indian cities haven't had their names updated. These names were changed even before Ubuntu began.
Tere are many other important world cities whose names havent been updated. Plz do it since it doesnt create a good impression about Ubuntu. It is throurghly unprofessional!

One of the nice things in the system update utility for OS X is that if any of the updates require a reboot then it displays an icon notifying the user of this. This way I could always cherry pick updates that wouldn't interrupt my work.

This should be fairly trivial from a UI perspective (i don't know how difficult it would be to implement)

Some applications don't give the proper feedback to the user when starting an action and just hang until the task finishes (or hangs forever). Also, the responsiveness should be improved, mainly by multithreading the applications, so the user doesn't have to wait for certain tasks to finish to perform others. Even if the starting of the other tasks depends on the conclusion of the first, by multithreading it's possible, for example, to disable all the buttons but keep the window enabled, instead of "hanging" the window until the task finishes and, ultimaly giving "application not responding" messages when a user tries do close de window.

If people have webcams, I think its a nice idea to have a face of the cube that is actually a mirror, that is to see yourself in full screen. So let's say you want to have a quick check on yourself, you do "ctrl + alt + up" and it changes to the mirror. Im saying compiz because it can actually make the whole cube more useful, but it can be a separate piece of software, that can be nicely integrated with a good shortcut.

People keep focusing about what's great on Ubuntu. But being over-enthusiastic can be dangerous, and we should study all the angry reviews of bloggers, newbies to make a list of things people didn't like about Ubuntu. Just like the Fridge tracks success stories all over the world, the Sink will track every negative point about Ubuntu so that the developers' attention can be drawn to it.

We will summarize any review available on the web, any mail we receive, any negative forum post, and in general any negative feedback about Ubuntu.

We should create a way for Ubuntu users to send us easily URLs of sites with negative reviews by an Firefox extension that would send us the URL and also a comment from the user (not compulsory)
Having a separate field for the URL would allow duplicate detection, and permit us to see the top problems about Ubuntu.

We could design this as part of the bts or settle a new BTS, but it should stay very simple so that the issues are not buried.
Eventually, when the problem is solved on our side, we should send a mail to the author, telling him that we appreciated his review, and that we (or upstream) fixed it.

Ubuntu sucks search on google >> http://www.google.fr/search?q=ubuntu+sucks&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=fir efox&rls=org.mozilla:fr:unofficial
Ubuntu negative review >>
http://www.google.fr/search?hs=kak&hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox&rls=org.mozill a%3Afr%3Aunofficial&q=ubuntu+review+negative&btnG=Search

I recent install a HD IDE to my Ubuntu machine to make a backup... it's on NTFS and I have to copy 22Gb.... Not really slow but the rest of the system was very, very, very sloooow.

Open a Firefox was 3 minutes and my PC is a AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600, 2Gb de RAM DDRII 667....

Perhaps it's my system but on other operating systems I don't have this problem. And I installed my Ubuntu 2 months ago.


As always, sorry about my poor english.

If you want to get a window completely out of the way, you can minimize it. If you want to see only a single window, you can maximize it. If you want to have it take up, for example, the left half of the screen, you have to unmaximize the window, then resize it, then reposition it. This could be a lot easier. Here is how it could work:

1 - Position some application in a place you frequently use it.
2 - Click on a small button located somewhere on the window. (Next to the minimize button?)
3 - Choose "New region" from the drop down.

Now, when you want to put that application back in the exact same spot, just click the button and select the region from the list. The application would then jump to that position and resize itself.

For the next Ubuntu version, make a commitment to implement at least one idea out of the top five for every category.

Of course we know developers look at the brainstorm results and sometimes comment on them, but I think it would be a good idea to make a solid commitment like this acknowledging what Ubuntu's users want.

This is a very useful feature i know from Mac OS X. You don't need to startup a burn app or add a disc first. In Mac OS X you select the files you want to burn, then the window tells you how much space you need on the disc.

as far as i know there is no way to decompress an archive thats passwordprotected within a GUI. You alsways have to use the konsole.

I am interested - is there any reason why ARK is not able to ask the user for a simple password?

It is a little usability improvement to the menu editor to put a kind of filter bar.
When we need to edit one entry of the menu we wouldn't need anymore to search among the categories and we just type a keyword for the entry.
It's not much and I know menu editor is not often used but that's the kind of little detail that makes everything easier.
I think I've seen similar ideas for nautilus. It would be great to implement that.