Hardware support category

The point here is that Drivers manager should not only download restricted drivers, but it should solve all hardware-related issues where possible. I mean, it should recognize your hardware and download all the drivers available in the repos for you - when the drivers needed aren't on the install CD.

I have two batteries for my laptop. The original one with very low capacity and a new one with good capacity.
When I swap the batteries, Ubuntu doesn't notice the difference and predicts the wrong "time remaining", because it thinks the old battery is still in there.

There sould be seperate predictions for different batteries.
(by capacity, serial number or producer)

On my Inspiron 1520 laptop, when the Ubuntu splash screen is present and the OS is loading, I can use the fn-keys to adjust the screen's brightness. However once the login window appears, these keys no longer control brightness until I'm fully logged in to my system. Similarly, I can't adjust the system volume until I've logged in, which can be disruptive if I am in a library and need to log in, and I don't have any way of muting the volume short of logging into a failsafe (silent) terminal session to mute from command line.

I would love it if you could just use your laptop's fn keys to adjust brightness and volume from the login window.

Right now, if you have a piece of unsupported hardware, Ubuntu does nothing, and you are stuck googling and scouring the forums to see if there are alternatives to getting your hardware working, or even just to confirm that your hardware really doesnt work.

I propose that instead of nothing, Ubuntu whisks you off to a wiki page based off of the hardware Identifier. There, I expect two main activities to take place; users can collaborate on alternative installation methods, and collaborate on advocacy for native linux support.

Some example cases:
3D Graphics older than 6 months. Ubuntu will probabaly have a driver in the restricted-drivers-manager, but is that it? Now it works, and who cares? Why not still link to a page where those interested can email NVidia whatever about their desire for native linux support. Or, if there is a way to donate money to the cause...

3D cards newer than 6 months. A person buying the latest graphics cards won't get support from Ubuntu till the next release, which could be 6 months away (AFAIK). The wiki page could include all the advocacy info previously stated, additionally it could have manual driver installation instructions, like compiling the driver.

NdisWrapper: I have a wireless card that I use ndiswrapper for. I got it working through having good luck through google, and the ubuntuguide.org website, which AFAIK is being slowly taken down. If I got a new card, I'm not sure how I would get it working. The wiki could hold all this info directly, and additionally, I would love to email someone about getting native linux support, even though I have the card working ATM.

Webcam: I bought a webcam on sale, and spent several hours trying to get it working, and googling for information, only to find that it is known that there is NO support for linux at all. It would be nice if I was just told that right away, and a wiki could do that.


SO, to restate the idea: Much hardware today (AFAIK) has a type identifier which OS's use to install the correct driver. Currently, if ubuntu has no support, it does nothing. I wish Ubuntu would pop up a message, and link me to a wiki page (based on the ID) where I could collaborate with other owners of the hardware.

[....]

One of the suggestions powertop (a tool that helps to save battery power) told me is to turn off my notebook's bluetooth when it is not being used.
"Disable the unused bluetooth interface with the following command:
hciconfig hci0 down; rmmod hci_usb"

I think it would be nice to have a way to turn off/on bluetooth graphically using bluetooth applet.

I just got a Logitech wave keyboard. Some special keys, such as volume adjustment work out of the box. Other keys do not even generate xev events. So to take fully advantage of this keyboard you have to use Windows or MacOSX.

I would be glad if Canonical could find a way to get everything work out of the box :)

right now, the only way you'll find out if dma was disabled is after you start burning on the disc and find your computer rendered unresponsive for the next 50-70 minutes (if you're writing a full dvd) and you're left with two options: leave the computer at peace and go buy your groceries till the burning is done or abort the process and ruin a perfectly fine disc..

i wish if brasero could warn me first about the situation..

Please collaborate with scanner manufacturers to write a standard USB device class and protocol for all scanners, so that every scanner built for the standard will work with any driver written for the standard.

http://www.ideastorm.com/article/show/10089668/create_a_standard_USB_device_cla ss_for_scanners

We all want that it would work like in Windows. When USB device is safely removed, the light turns off.

As far as I understand "Unmount" is not "Safely remove" because it does not disconnect USB devices and I have no idea how to do that in Linux.

There must be an option to unmount or disconnect flash drives, mp3 etc.

DRI is supposed to be supported for my radeon x700 but it's broken in xorg 7.3 with the available DRM/DRI modules.

“ATI RADEON X550/X700 Series “, RV410, 5657
“ATI RADEON X550/X700 Series Secondary “, RV410, 5677

I tried xorg 7.4 in a live CD environment and was able to get DRI working right away. There are probably other people with these issues who are wondering why DRI isn't working on chipsets that are supposed to be supported. Interestingly, xorg 7.3 also does not detect my widescreen display and displayconfig-gtk has been removed from the menus.

Providing some .deb packages for xorg 7.4 (even in an out-of-the-way repository that has to be manually disabled) that will work with ubuntu-desktop would be very useful for people like me.

Hi,

i think its important to create a new GUI of Hardware Device Manager, because we want to now what hardware its not installed and maybe update or install it from the GUI.

it need to say what is the pc hardware and what its not installed, for simple hardware resolution

thanks

Intel provides onboard video although most people asking support for nvdia and ati cards and they have envy that can configure the card and drivers it will search.but intel motherboards are very popular,onboard video is not configured correctly so to correct this we need frontend,common to all intel based motherboards like starting from 845gvsr,mine to latest x48.additionally it will help users to configure/correct screen resolution problems.
there are manuals to configure xorg and also installing intel945 drivers issue.but i doubt messing up system,so it will be great help.
alternatively if this is not possible gui to intel 945.it can be default or
in repository because most of the people want it to be default

A quick test series that detects and tests working and/or recognized components would be very helpful.

I rebuild/refurbish desktop/laptop pc's (turn those discarded "slow" XP boxes into fresh and fast X/K/Ubuntu machines) - and it's usually easy to "see" that video works, but finding a quick test for things like the sound is always a challenge. I know there are other hardware bits that it would be good to see that the system thinks is working (maybe something with "lshw" is a start?).

Windows hardware profiles under "my computer" used to show "working" or "?" for system bits it recognized and believed were working (like the Ethernet card - it saw it but the drivers were missing and you were off on an Internet search).

A combination list that shows what is recognized by Ubuntu and what Ubuntu thinks is working correctly along with a "click to test" icon would make validating a fresh installation simple and quick without any lagging problems (like getting a freshly installed pc to a non-Ubuntu user and they can't find how to fix the microphone since they are new and easily discouraged).

Next steps would be for that chart to offer advice on how to get those components working (website link, .deb, compile from source, no current solution for this device, etc).

This test suite could be located either at the liveCD first menu (initial screen where options are run, install, memtest, etc are located) as that would be the fastest, or as an icon on the liveCD desktop after boot-up (which would make better sense as all the normal hardware sensing programs have been run and the system is ready to use or test).

just check this
http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=11hys7r&s=3
parsix does offer a screen resolution during install or in live cd mode.so it will be better or else create another menu to boot into some other resolutions than standard.wide screen and they should start from
800*600(normal) at different refresh rate 60-70-72-75-85hz
1024*768(normal) at different refresh rate 60-70-72-75-85hz for CRT these are most preferred
below are most usual lcd monitor resolutions
* 14-15": 1024x768 (XGA)
* 17-19": 1280x1024 (SXGA)
* 20"+: 1600x1200 (UXGA)
* 17" (Widescreen): 1280x800 (WXGA)
* 19" (Widescreen): 1440x900 (WXGA+)
* 20" (Widescreen): 1680x1050 (WSXGA+)
* 24" (Widescreen): 1920x1200 (WUXGA)
* 30" (Widescreen): 2560x1600
if above screen resolutions can work then work is done for 95% of monitors

I have heard a number of reports that USB headsets are not plug'n'play accessible. I personally have two headsets of different makes, and neither of them work properly.

If I plug a USB headset into a computer, it should route all audio (in and out) to the headset; in Ubuntu this does not happen without configuration. Windows does it flawlessly, all applications will be automatically configured, but not Ubuntu.

Users shouldn't have to resort to buying an audio-jack style headset to have easy support in Ubuntu.

ask ubuntu developers to sign the open letter to nvidia for opensourcing the graphics drivers at http://www.opentheblob.com/nvidia/ this way linux users would have better support for graphic cards

Linux does not support sleep/suspend on MANY usb->sata/pata chipsets. There exists a patch to fix this: "scsi-idle for nslu2-linux" ***

Ubuntu should use/maintain the patch for those external cases where hdparm/sdparm/sg3_tools spindown commands do not work.


***
http://handhelds.org/hypermail/oe/49/4973.html
http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/FAQ/SpinDownUSBHarddisks
http://fredericiana.com/2005/12/16/nslu2-linux-usb-harddrive-spindown/

Problem ;

In scanner software there can be many different settings to adjust, to get the best result.
Each adjustment may need some playing with, and then a test scan done to check the result, or have look at an estimated preview.

This can take quite a bit of time.


Objective ;

The user is usually trying to optimise results in terms of parameters like ;
1) Clarity (sharpness, contrast, etc)
2) Colour Balance
3) OCR success rate
4) Minimal spelling mistakes in OCR

Solution ;

These (performance) parameters can be measured.

Thumb Nailing tests (like in photography) are a handy way to preview the results of a range of settings and compare them. They can also be used to compare the variation of one setting (horizontally on the page/preview display), while also varying another setting (vertically).

Previews may be calculated as "estimates" of what the result "may" look like. But thumbnails could be "done for real", using different settings for different parts of the image, or for the same small representative part of the image.

The user could choose whether they want to use the preview estimates or scanned thumbnail results for testing.

[....]

I love Ubuntu, but I have chosen not to use it on several of my systems because of a single reason, the lack of integrated, automatic support for what is often called "fake" RAID, or software/driver-supported RAID (i.e. Desktop grade Promise, nVRAID, Intel storage matrix, etc.) chipsets.

I use Linux as my primary OS at work and at home and I use Ubuntu on my "single" HDD systems. However due to the lack of hardware detection and support of various SATA RAID chipsets, I am holding off on installing on my main workstations.

Right now my only real option is to have an additional single drive for installation of Ubuntu, and simply remove my array drives from the fstab so that they are not accessed at all so as not to risk corrupting the array.

It would be nice if Ubuntu would support SATA RAID (0,1,0+1,1+0,5, etc.) through the use of a special driver (a-la "BlueHat" and "GreenLizard" distros), thus allowing RAID without having to create special "RAID" partitions (Which can't be done if you simply want to access the data on an array, even an NTFS one without breaking your array consistency, or losing all your data).

While these chipsets are not full on RAID like high end versions, they do offer a significant advantage over pure software driven RAID if they would be properly supported.

There should be an easy to use GUI with the ndis wrapper that allows me to just download the wifi driver, extract it, and then select the folder the driver is in and then it will set it up automatically for me. That would be so awesome if put in for those who are having trouble with the linux version of the wifi driver.

It should also notify you if there is no driver available for your wifi adapter so that you can use this to install one.