Contributor Crandom

This is not my idea.

You can get a lot of tutorials explaining how to do it.
But they are very scary for a newbie.


It would be really nice if there were a GUI tool for linux and windows(of course! ;D) to which i could point the .iso file,and it would ask me to boot from the disk on next reboot.
Or better than that, it should have an option to copy all the settings from my current installation and automatically set it up in the new installation.

A new version of Ubuntu is released every 6 months.
Unlike windows Ubuntu is so stable that i never had to reinstall it.No doubt getting an new Ubuntu CD is damn easy.But Since i am in the habit of upgrading to every new version, i have dozens of CDs lying at the bottom of my drawer. What a waste!

I have made my own customized 'Hacked Heron' which fits only on a dvd. I am unable to install it on my friend's computer who does not have a dvd drive and another whose dvd drive is broken.

When a USB stick (or some other kind of data storage) is pulled out, while something is written on it or while part of the data is still cached in the RAM, freeze all file operations to the device and demand it to be plugged in again. After it is plugged in again, complete the remaining operations and unmount the device.
If the warning dialogue is canceled by the user, then cancel all operations and regard the device as unmounted.

edit: Thanks to Auzy for finding the very good description of this in http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/1515/ which was lost due to being incorrectly marked as a duplicate of something completely different.

People around the globe that are using/concidering using Ubuntu are afraid that some of their hardware won't work for them. And some are frustrated to buy additional add-on cards to work around unsupportad onboard chips. All this could be avoided with a lookup in an ubuntu Hardware Database Website.

Some problematic hardware can be used with more or less work if helping information is available together with the hardware compatabillity data.

The hardware database can be found at http://hwdb.ubuntu.com/

From idea #47: The data should then be available in a format that is simple for users to browse on-line when considering new hardware.

every time i login i can't see the ntfs drives mounted.I must go to computer the click on each one to mount it( i have ubuntu 8.04) and i did not have this problem in ubuntu 7.10. Maybe for the new (unlock) icon.
I hope to make ubuntu mount them automatically after the logon.
-going to try login with root to see if there any changes-
thank you

For example, I noticed that Warsow (shooter online game) is in version 0.32 in the repositories, and the up to date version is 0.42. It would not be a very big problem if the program would still be usefull, but in this case, as the game is online, needs to conect to a server and this directly depends on the version that is installed. So, this package in the repositories is useless because nobody will be able to play as they arent players in the servers for this version.

Everybody does not realize that the version is old, so there is people that is going to think that the game isnt playable and this affects very negatively to the users experience.

And I guess that warsow is not the only package with this problem.
If something in the repositories is useless, there must be a change: update it or remove it, both options are better than having the wrong idea of why something doesnt work. It is better to think that the problem can be fixed easily.
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I want to clarify something: I am not talking about the packages that are still useful even if they are not updated. Of course, they should be updated, but the main problem I am pointing out are the packages that are useless if they are not updated because I think that these are more urgent than the others. It seems logical for me, as the other packages still work and have a practical function while these are completely useless.
As sidney said in one of his comments, maybe this packages that I am talking about could be reduced to the ones that depend on internet, but not necessarily and they dont have to be games necessarily either.
So, I would bet that there are lots o packages that have no reason to exist if they are not updated and and we need a deep revision, update and cleaning.

I hope to have clarified the idea completely now.
Leave a comment if the vote is negative, please, so I can improve something.
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There are some very good ideas in some comments (for example, Auzy's, ru7hl3ss's or mp3phish's), so read them and take them into account too, please.

When the /home paritition is full, and we try to login, gdm just don't login and go back to the connection screen.

We have not any informations why the login fails. I know by searching into forums that it is because the partition was full and I just had to remove some files.

This kind of problems is frequent, and a newbie cannot do anything, he must search on google, but without a working session, he cannot do anything.

For me it is a blocking issue.

I propose to show a warning message which explains why we cannot login (partition full, not write access, etc), if we cannot do that at login, do it when the partition has less than 5% space available or something like that.

I find it very annoying when I update my Ubuntu box, only to find that after the update I need to reboot. I suggest a solution similar to Apple's software update*, where the update has the reboot icon located next to it to signify that a reboot will be needed or a reboot icon on the panel, similar to the way the new red down arrow in hardy signifies an important update.

*Image for reference: http://i92.photobucket.com/albums/l25/CATSCEO/update.png

Hardware acceleration of visual components helps to free resources, by utilizing the processing power of the Gpu.

Currently, the (afaik) the only hardware accelerated component of the Ubuntu distribution is the windowing system.

Please work toward hw accelerating the rest of the visual stack.

There needs to be an easy way to recover a Ubuntu installation that got screwed somehow. [Edit: In my case, I uninstalled GNOME and switched to KDE, but then was not able to use my network, so I couldn't reinstall GNOME.] My idea is an option on the Live CD (called "Recover my Ubuntu") that will re-install all the packages that came with Ubuntu, leaving all your files and preferences untouched. This option would also allow for a CD-assisted startup of Ubuntu.

I don't really know if this has already been implemented on Ubuntu, but applying Fedora ideas to boost X startup would be appreciated.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/OneSecondX

After all, it takes up a lot of space, creates clutter and it's absolutely of no use for people that got just one user on the computer.

Many new users are confused by device names such as /dev/sda1, /dev/sdb5, /dev/hda2, /dev/hdc4, etc.

So I propose to show volume labels (partition names) in the installer, to make it easier for users who install Ubuntu to know which partition they are installing on.

Screenshots:
* Before
* After

This will make it clearer and easier to install Ubuntu without any mistakes being done which might result in that a new user accidentally looses valuable data.

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?

By integrating ndiswrapper + an ndigwrapper gui into the network manager, setting up wifi drivers will be a whole lot easier. The user would not need to know what ndiswrapper is or where to find it or how to install it -- all they'd need is their wifi card .inf file.

When Firefox 3 is released, make sure it is available to Ubuntu on the same day, so the updates from the Ubuntu repository can be counted for the *Guinness world record* in most downloads in 24 hours.
And most importantly, talk to Mozilla about relaying your Firefox 3 repository download data to them.
More info here: http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord

Let's help open source achieve another great victory!

When one starts Synaptics manager it takes a long time to be available for use (I am using 1.7GHz Dualcore/1GB RAM!!!).

After that we have to click on "Search" and then type what we want. But most of the time when starting Synaptic the first thing you want is to search for something.

So I suggest that "Search" should not depend on a click to show it's input text bar but rather it could show a large bar at the top with focus as it fires up, so we may start typing as soon as we see the program running.

After one search is complete it should focus the search box back so we search again without our tired mouse.

With all the artists Ubuntu has, and Grub not going anywhere soon, could grub at least get a splash screen by default? It's much more appealing than the simple menu that exists now.

I checked my permissions in "Users and Groups" and noticed that I do have permission to use a dial-up modem to connect to the internet and access floppy and CD-ROM drives, but I do not have permission to use the scanner.

Why is this? It does not make sense.

Add the use of scanner to default permission.

There are many Windows applications which have no equivalent on Linux but do work rather well in Wine.

These applications often need to be installed manually though like on Windows. It would be much easier if such applications would also be readily accessible right from within adept/synaptic.

These packages would just have a dependency on Wine and include everything that's necessary to run the application on Wine (maybe in the form of other dependancies on support packages). These would likely end up in a non-free repository, but would still help many users.

One currently already existing example is the pptview package, which seems to work rather well.


One good candidate I think would be Grand Theft Auto 2, which was released by Rockstar for free (gratis) and works very well in Wine.
There are many more of such gratis Windows games and other gratis Windows applications out there, which would really add value if they can be installed similarly easy to other packages in the repository.

Many games feature the ability to play with other people. However, the first thing the game will check for is to see if it is currently up to date. When Ubuntu enters version freeze, the games fall out of date, and it can be harder to play them online without finding a 3rd party update or compiling it yourself (Freeciv, Scorched3D, and Battle for Wesnoth to name a few). This also creates issues when different distributions freeze at different times, so it can be hard to play with other Linux users.

Ubuntu should provide a repository for up to date games for games that will always need the latest version to play online.