Internet & Networking category

At the moment it's possible to manage traditional wired and WiFi connections using Network Manager. To connect via a modem, a 3G/GPRS card, over bluetooth to a cell phone or via USB to another device requires that the user installs extra packages, and does a fair amount of configuration that isn't found in Network Manager.

A single unified tool should be provided which allows the user to connect to a network (or internet) via any supported method. It would also be useful to provide an extension to this tool to manage firewall rules and network connection sharing.

More support for more wireless chipsets out of the box and "Windows style" ease of set up.

I have spent may a day trying to configure wireless cards on Ubuntu, often without much luck!

Please also deliver more support for what they are both wireless PCI cards and USB, as it is currently very low base of drivers for such devices

Currently it is very difficult to setup and control access to shared folders without editing conf files and reading detailed instructions on all the variables. I propose that sharing (specifically Samba) be given a well worked GUI and some real TLC to bring it up to standard with the experience on Windows or OS X.

For example, by default a share should be accessible as Read Only by anyone on the network without a username or password (guest access). While guest access should be turned on by default, it should also be easy to turn it off, and if desired to give guests read/write access to the folder.

You should also be able to specify local users who will have read/write access, and these local users should sync with smb users invisibly (ie: the user doesn't need to know that there are two password databases being used).

I propose the Properties window for a folder should contain a Sharing tab with all the options available to choose. I also propose a Shared Folders option in the Preferences menu should list the currently shared folders along with their settings, and provide a button to take you into the dialogue where you can set the options.

Pidgin is a good program to chat on all protocols, but a webcam plugin is still missing.
The developers aren't decided to code webcam support, but having this in Pidgin is very needed.

Or why not code this plugin for emesene? But you can only use the MSN protocol at the moment!

Renew ip address
flush DNS
Etc

One of the things included in Hardy was ufw (Uncomplicated firewall wall), but everything has to be done via CLI. There is a very nice GUI frontend being developed for it and it would be nice if it is bundled as a default package.

Links to the project:
https://launchpad.net/gui-ufw
http://gufw.tuxfamily.org/index.html

It would be useful to create a graphical user interface for the new ufw (Uncomplicated Firewall) in Ubuntu. Would be useful to make every new release with an enabled firewall by default and with this graphical firewall utility also.

The default Firefox ships with defaults that aren't exactly ideal for speed. If Ubuntu would default to slightly improved defaults (Pipelining enabled for example) it would speed it up and make it more ideal.

There should be an easy way to create via GUI network profiles - where network address, various log-ins, shares, printer, TOR, firewall and proxy settings etc etc are all linked together into profiles - for me e.g. "Home", "Work", "Cafe", "church" etc.

There are scripted ways to do this, but via GUI would be wonderful.

It would be great if Ubuntu (or other distributions as well) provide an easy to use remote desktop solution. While it's quite easy to connect to a remote X-Server (x over ssh or nx), it's rather hard to get also support for sound (from the remote desktop), printing (using your local printers on the remote desktop) and other things like "tray-icons" / "notification area" (have the Notification-Icons of remote applications in the local "notification area").

Update:
"x2go" looks pretty interesting: http://x2go.berlios.de/index-en.html
It uses the NX libs and they also provide a client for Windows. But I have not tested it (yet).

There is a logic for this in my opinion:

1 - Improve usability, stability and speed for Firefox users in Ubuntu. Beta 5 has some big issues.

2 - This also would help the Mozilla dev team because there would be thousand of users using RC1 instead of Beta5.

3 - The "Beta" can confuse some users.


So, what do you think?

While both Evolution and Thunderbird are great applications, Thunderbird should become the default email client available on Ubuntu.

Its very annoying to carry a whole pc to a place where you can have LAN, just to download ndiswrapper so you can go further trough wireless internet. If it would be added on cd/install, it would take alot of annoyance away.

When a folder is shared, the icon stays the same in nautilus. There is an icon that can be added to the folder to show that it is shared, but this icon should be automatically added so users know what folders are shared.

It would also be nice to have an option in the rightclick menu to "unshare"

This is an attempt at a unification of:

http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/7081/
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/7390/
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/7649/
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/7725/

I can't think, nor have I heard, of any showstopper reason for why BitTorrent shouldn't be used as the primary download method of Ubuntu respository packages. Although the specifics of the implementation of this idea will be different for ISOs and repositories, I feel they should be unified in the brainstorm because the goal is to allow the rapid, efficient, reliable, and available download of Ubuntu software.

Implementation Benefits

1) Speed. All Ubuntu downloads (ISO downloads, dist upgrades, regular system updates, and new application installs) will as a whole be faster. Generally torrent download speeds benefit from higher numbers of downloaders that seed, which Ubuntu users have demonstrated they are prone to do. BitTorrent is better able to absorb (and eventually use as an asset) large numbers of users attempting to download data at the same time, such as with the recent mad rush of Hardy downloaders/upgraders.

2) Efficiency. The BitTorrent protocol has proven to be one of the most efficient methods of distributing data amongst a large number of clients. It will harness the collective upstream of tens of thousands of Ubuntu users, from DSL and cable connections to the fastest of corporate connections.

3) Reliability. Checksums guarantee the integrity of BitTorrent downloads, so data corruption is much less likely to occur. Only the pieces that fail checksum are redownloaded, contributing to points 1 and 2.


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It's silly to be pushing open standards when we don't follow them for our own sites.

All Ubuntu websites should pass the W3C validation checks:
http://www.ubuntu.com/ 20 Errors
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ 21 Errors
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/ 306 Errors
https://launchpad.net/ 5 Errors
http://releases.ubuntu.com/ 15 Errors

Some of these are really simple fixes, but showing that we care about open standards is priceless.

For reference, others that fail:
Microsoft, Sun, KDE fail. Novell and Apple fail with 1 Error.

Those that pass:
Red Hat, opensuse, Debian, Fedora, Linux Mint, Gnome, Opera, Firefox and OpenOffice.org

Currently samba sharing is (in my opinion) broken, since you can't share your folders through the GUI. Instead, you have to resort to the CLI in order to create a samba user which pretty much defeats the whole purpose of a GUI.

My proposal is to modify the samba share dialogue so that it allows to create samba users:

http://img360.imageshack.us/img360/8206/pantallazocarpetascompaqd0.png

It would be great to be able to configure two interfaces with Network Manager or anything else and share the internet from one to another (NAT).

For example if I have cable and wireless, I could be able to share my cable internet and act like an access point.
Or on the other way if I have wireless networking but my friends haven't it would be nice it I could share my network with them thought ethernet.

I think that we must have a GUI for ipv6 configuration.
Other distributions like Fedora or OpenSUSE, OSX and even MS Vista already have it. IPv4 is dying, ISP's are beginning to distribute IPv6 adresses for 2~3 years and DNS root servers have recently switch to v6 too.
Ubuntu should be ready for the Internet of today and tomorrow and integrate IPv6 (fixed, dhcpv6, RA, ...) in the GNOME 'Network Settings' (and the same in KDE) as soon as possible.

It's very annoying to try to find the binary file in Firefox/Mozilla's "Download" -> "Open With" -> "Other...(Select Application)" dialog. When you're compiling Mozilla for X11, shouldn't they detect the menu system?