Contributor Matthias

Create and include a 'Speakers and sound' graphical configuration tool that would be able to configure the system soundcards and speaker settings (from simple stereo to surround 5.1, 7.1)

When someone wants to unmount a volume and the mount point is used, he gets a message telling him that the volume can't be unmounted because an application uses it. The user has no idea which application is actually using it and can't remove the device.

I propose that the popup tells him which application(s) is(are) using the device and propose to terminate them (that list should be kept up to date when the app. dies).

The new guest account in 8.10 needs to be accessed from the login screen not from inside another account. This is redundant and poses a security threat. Great idea but since Ubuntu is based on Debian, security needs to be a top priority. Keep the guest account but like I said before it needs to be accessed from the login screen.

There is a newly launched website that shows screenshots of programs packaged in Debian.
http://screenshots.debian.net

Note it says:
Michael Vogt has added support into synaptic.

I hope to see it included in Jaunty!

But since most newbies use Add/Remove programs it would be useful to include the screenshot support there as well.

Jaunty aims at merging the web and the desktop, it should include automatic downloads of screenshots from this site in the Add/Remove application, so that users can see what an application looks like before they decide whether to install it or not.

I just installed Ubuntu and i see a red arrow with exclamation mark telling me that there are 86 updates available. Great. I click on the error and Update manager starts.
Pretty soon i get confronted with the following message box:

"
You must check for updates manually

Your system does not check for updates automatically. You can configure this behavior in Software Sources on the Updates tab.
"

First of all i had figure out the meaning of the first sentence: "You must check for updates manually" Is it an order? Is someone telling me that I MUST do something? Why do i must to do it MANUALLY? How do I do it manually? After some cognitive friction i realized that it was not an order but a statement that the system was not configured to do it automatically for me. Oh ok. Why not turn things around and put "Your system does not check for updates automatically." on top? And explain that in order to keep system safe and sound i will have to "check for updates manually".

Last statement explains how and where to do it and there is another sentence ("Hide this information in the future") that allows me to just ignore the issue forever right here and then. Why not turn this around as well? Let me "Enable Automatic Updates" right here and then instead. And telling me then that i can revert to Manual Updates "in Software Sources on the Updates tab" seems logical to me.

It does not end here though...
After i clicked on Close and ran the update i decided to enable automatic updates. Update manager did not have a any tabs at all! Huh? After looking for an "Update tab" all over the place it turned out there was a Software Sources menu item under System--Administration which has an Update Tab.
Better wording would be "You can configure this behavior on the Updates tab in Administration's Software Sources menu."


[....]

When a user tries to open a file that ubuntu doesn't know how to handle*, the user should be offered to install an application that handles that file type**.

* i.e. there's no association with the file's mime type and an application or default action.

** How to implement this:
- have debtags be installed by default.
- Determine the file's type t such that works-with-format::t is an existing tag.
- Search for all applications matching "works-with-format::t AND interface::x11" (there's no interface::gnome or interface::kde, otherwise that'd be preferred).
- Filter out all those that are installed (under the assumption that they /would/ have a mimetype association if they worked with the file).
- Sort the matching applications by popularity [gathered from the popularity-contest data].
- Suggest that the user tries the top one.

The nautilus context menu should have an option "Find applications to work with this file".

(I think it should also have that for files that already have a mime association; if you're tired of the application you're using, or just want to try a new one, that's a great way to discover alternatives).

I would like to see the DVD support as a "codec" in gstreamer too.

So when I try to play a DVD I will be asked if i want to install "libdvdcss2".

Of course the legal issues have to be mentioned.

Launchpad interface should be in several languages... I think that the best way to do it is using launchpad itself.

When using the live CD it would be really nice to see if there are som hardware that doesn't work with Ubuntu. You can open a sound file to see if the soundcard (for example) is working etc. But that isn't something that a normal desktop user would do.

If you could get a message thats says: "I've found hardware that ubuntu has no support for. Tell the hardware manufacturer to release drivers for linux...", tell us which pci-port it sits in and the info the hardware give the computer, the user would get some guidance on what's not going to work and maybe oversees this instead of taking out his anger on Ubuntu after the installing and finding out that his soundcard isn't supported.

It would be even nicer with a central hardware database where more advanced users could post: "this info belongs to this hardware", in clear text. So instead of "my name is x and I use y chipset" it would be "Creative x-fi fatal1ty is not supported...". In that way, the user could easily see what wasn't going to work.

In any way, something like this, even a popup window with mumbojumbo would help, just so the user know that something is wrong. I've seen kind of similar posts, dealing with informing the user of unsupported hardware when for instance inserting a non-supported webcam, and maybe this is in a way a double post. But the focus from my side is to tell the user that some hardware isn't going to work before he/she installs Ubuntu.

I'm no programmer so I can't estimate the time this takes to do (it is surely a lot), but I still wanted to present my idea. I would be really glad and grateful if some programmer or dev devoted some time to program any functionality like this.

When a panel applet is locked you should not be able to remove it. You should be forced to unlock it first - no minimize applets removed by mistakes.

When trying to do a personal web page, a huge lack i used to feel on a web browser like Firefox, Galeon, and so many others, is the possibility of using .xpm pictures on a web page as easy i can use .png or .jpg

Of course many people can see this as not interesting idea, since .xpm can be double as large of an uncompressed .tif or .bmp, but the interesting is the flexibility we have on this kind of picture format, since it is a text-editable format, very easy to be done from a php script from the server, for example...

.xpm could be considered one of the default picture formats everywhere, specially because its flexibility. I truly home w3c.org could help supporting this idea as well.

Provide a few pages of documentation that (in layman's terms)describe the standard default and some of the more common added processes (e.g. 'top' or System Monitor), similar (but better) to BlackViper's page for Windows. While the documentation is out there, it takes forever to find it AND to understand for beginners/intermediate users. P.S. I am not a programmer so maybe that is often the issue.

http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm

In Sweden, as well as in the US, as far as I understood there are now new legislation coming up that seriously compromises the privacy of the users.

In Sweden we have two very worrying laws coming up.

1. The "FRA-law" that gives the Swedish security police the right to wiretapp and datamine ALL international data traveling through Sweden.
2. The "Logging-law". Telco operators will be obliged to collect all information about their users whereabouts and keep that information for a year.

We have to work towards the aim: Security by default - and I'm not talking about the system, but to protect our datastreams from being wiretapped.

Me personally think that PKI is the solution to use here whereever possible. IF a session to/from a Ubuntu-system could be read in clear text the user/administrator should be aware of it.

Postfix is important here, Dovecot as well - all emails should be send over encrypted channels by default.

Mark Shuttleworth with his huge knowledge in Digital Certificates (He sold Thawte remember) would be of great help here.

I would like to see Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu leverage an infrastructure and create services to provide their community with a good, PKI-based solution.

Privacy matters

Sincerely
Niklas Andersson, Swedish TechWorld Open Source

Edit 1: I've made a proposition of a real-world-implementation of a very viable way to solve the email issue at a user-level.

[....]

When I select a music file, video file or picture in Nautilus I would like to get some basic information about them in the status bar:

- For video and music: Length and quality.
- For pictures: Size (in pixels)

I think it's annoying that I have to open a movie just to find out how long it is.

It seems wasting time upgrading the softwares after the installation and installing the old software on the CD.Debian GNU/Linux provides the net-inst CD and ensures that what we installed are the newest packages. But what about Ubuntu?

1) Provide an upgrade option when network available during installation.

2) Provide a network install CD or include the function in the alternative installation.

*) Thank cheesehead for providing link I missed.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD
But, is it possible to make it obvious and ease of use?

3) During installation, check if the package has the newer version on the repository. If so, grab the newer package and install it, else, install the package on the CD. (It works if the installation is package-by-package.)

I created a new user account on my Ubuntu system called 'admin'. I soon realised that after a reboot I could not sudo or access Synaptic or unlock users-groups.

I traced this back to the new 'admin' user having a group 'admin' created which was written over the default system 'admin' group (for system administration). I had to do a recovery boot and delete the admin user (which deleted the group also). Then I had to recreate the group and add my user account to it and all was well again!

With this in mind, my suggestion is that users-groups should not allow a user to create a username that could cause problems with the system. There are several reserved names that should generate a warning before allowing the user to continue. These should include:

admin
root
users
syslog
klog
crontab
gdm

I was not sure if this was a bug or a suggestion, but since the users-groups program does not have this functionality built-in already I am submitting this as a suggestion.

Hello!
Please add a new theme, maybe the really good and most active theme "NewWave", that includes an GDM/Icon/GTK2/Metacity/Emerald Theme (http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Incoming/Intrepid/NewWave ) to the Intrepid Alpha! We really need a new design and it would be a good idea to simply add this new theme and check the user results.

(I dont want to see a heading like "Ubuntu 8.10 will not contain a new design")

Work with Google to receive an advanced Linux version of Google Chrome so you can package it and put it in the repositories at the same time of the release.

Now Ubuntu are stable enough to use it in enterprise, but it can not replace Windows because of lack Active Directory features. Main of AD feature is admin can configure all network from ONE server, and all configuration stores in ONE place and have the same userID for all network.

Ubuntu can do the same but it need to have common configuration repository and main programs must get config from this repo.


It is hard to change all software in Ubuntu to use common config-API, but Canonical can change their own soft (Bazaar, etc). Then prepare soft that can configure it.

This will be great step towards usability and admin frendship. Also this will add marketing points to Ubuntu, because neither Windows not other linux distro (RHEL, etc) have same functionality. SuSE have Yast, but it is not the same.

Ubuntu and Canonical as a big Linux player can begin this great task, and help Open Source projects create ONE configuration API and move to using it.

May be you should look at gconf first and another tools next. And begin to migrate Cannonical own products to this common conf API, then help other projects.

This IDEA will easily fix http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/68/ and so on.

Excuse my poor English.

Nautilus folder icons could show four small images from the first four files contained it them.

http://img174.imageshack.us/img174/6050/folderthumbnailslx7.jpg

Español:
El icono de carpetas en Nautilus podría incluir 4 pequeños iconos de los 4 primeros archivos que haya en la carpeta.