Contributor Monicker

Ubuntu 8.04 comes with the GCC compiler but without the 'build-essentials' metapackage.
This makes GCC useless; its not even possible to compile a simple "Hello world" program.

Either have GCC not installed by default or have the 'build-essential' metapackage installed by default so that GCC works.

I open a document with OpenOffice (e.g. a .ppt presentation), I browse through it and decide it's not the one I was looking for. When I close it, OpenOffice will ask me if I want to save or dismiss the changes. If you open 5-6 documents like this, it can be quite annoying...

OpenOffice should ignore the fact that I'm closing the document at a different page than the one it opened to...

Please push this idea upstream to the OOo developers...

The package descriptions in Synaptic often contain a link to the homepage of the package. It would be nice if they worked as hyperlinks.

(copy/paste is hard and double clicking selects the entire row instead of the word!)

Sometimes, when I try to open firefox, I get this error

Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system.

I propose to change that, including a button - "Close firefox now" :

Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process. [Close firefox now]

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.

After you log in through GDM, the startup sound usually plays before anything else starts, so sometimes you hear the sound even though the desktop is not yet ready i.e. you're still staring at the brown screen and the panels haven't come up yet.

Changing the time that sound is played to right after everything is ready would be a much more useful thing, it would actually indicate when you can use the computer.

From Squiggle in the comments (a much better idea):

Play a loopable sound (8 bar blues, etc) until loading is done then when things are loaded finish with another sound indicating all is ready to go. This is the sort of thing that games do well.

Add icons in the Update Manager, so that it shows what type of update it is, and how serious it is.

Look screenshot.
http://launchpadlibrarian.net/14500471/update-manager.png

Right now Network Manager doesn't give you an option to disconnect from a Wireless Network.
Your options are to connect to a different wireless network or drop to the console to disconnect.
It would be faster and easier to be able to disconnect using the same application you used to connect.

When you click on Network Manager a menu shows up with a list of wireless networks and the following options:
"Connect to other wireless networks..."
"Create new wireless network..."
"Manual configuration..."

My idea is to put the option "Disconnect from Wireless Network" on that menu.

Clicking this option would also add the network to a blacklist so that it won't automatically reconnect unless you connect manually to it.

UPDATE:
This idea has been actually implemented.
On the newer releases of Network manager, you can remove a wireless network by right clicking on the network manager icon on the notification area, and then clicking on "Edit wireless networks...".
A window will pop up where you can remove the networks you don't want to connect to.

I am looking at the new Power Manager of Ubuntu 8.04, I am missing my ability to adjust the amount that when unplugged my screen brightness dims by. So my thought was adding an Advanced button would be a good idea. A place where we can find power features like the dim control, the battery saving techniques listed already as ideas, the power scheme idea, and anything else that is an advanced power setting. This way we can have the ease of control and configurability(firefox tells me this is not a word) while still making the power manager easy to use for the average user that doesn't know or care that there are other settings there. And give people the ability to tell their computer how they want it to act. I for one miss the ability to set how much it dims from 7.10.

The blocked popup notification in Firefox should give an option to show the popup, that has just been blocked without changing any settings neither globally nor for the site.

Today I find myself in this position:
My Kubuntu System was roaring and terrible slow. I was wondering: “Did something go wrong during the upgrade?” One look in “top” thought me it was a daemon a “pinot” daemon. An other Search tool.... I just deinstalled “Strigi”! Many people will not look up what is using their resources they just will say: “ubuntu is slow”. People who want to use a Search Tool are able to activate it! So:

Please do not activate Data Crawlers per default!

http://ebupof.deviantart.com/art/Ubuntu-website-84984292

Some of the members at our swedish forum sugested to post it here. I just did what they told me to do. :)

This is my version of the Ubuntu.com website.

Please, refresh the pages about Ubuntu:

http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/
http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/desktopedition
http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/serveredition

-they're old and showing capabilities and screenshots of Ubuntu 6.06

It's great Memtest86+ comes with Ubuntu. It may help people who get problems with the LiveCD, and instead of saying Ubuntu sucks, this tool shows that they hardware is damaged.

However, the version of Memtest86+ used is quite old. The newest 2.01 supports the latest hardware and I see no reason why it should'nt be updated.

Please bring latest Memtest86+ with Intrepid Ibex!

The file alsa-info.sh, which can be found at http://hg.alsa-project.org/alsa/raw-file/tip/alsa-info.sh is very useful for triaging bugs in ALSA. There is already such a file included in the gnome-power-management package. I suggest to include this file too. It would be really helpful if you could just ask people to execute the command alsa-info.sh. It would be even better if apport would also include the results of this script in its reports about ALSA.

Some people just have bad ideas, but some people are just a deliberate PITA, if somebody suggests an idea that isnt actually an idea just complaint, give them a warning, if they do it again, ban them.

e.g corneel

Update: it looks like a better idea was implemented to stop the non-ideas,
"Finally, idea can now be marked as "Not an idea" by moderators.This will hopefully prevent further non-ideas, generally bugs, to be submitted on Ubuntu Brainstorm. Please remember that Brainstorm is a place to post ideas only! Any bugreports posted here won't be looked at. To report a bug, please use the Ubuntu bug tracker. "

now if only I could get rid of this idea

Here for example you see an idea where there are developer comments. They are not included in the comments count however, so it says 'no comments' on the front page. This is a bug.

http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/7999/

I know that linux doesn't care about extensions, but it should. when I have some folder with file .h, .c, .cpp, .txt the nautilus see them all as text files and it's not able to order them.

so I'm proposing the nautilus also consider the extensions after real types ordering.

There are at least 13 unpatched security vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel.
Please fix these. Some of them are many years old...

* Linux Kernel CHRP Denial of Service Security Issue
* Linux Kernel Multiple Vulnerabilities
* Linux Kernel Various Vulnerabilities
* Linux Kernel SMP "/proc" Race Condition Denial of Service
* Linux Kernel perfmon Local Denial of Service Vulnerability
* Linux Kernel IP ID Value Increment Weakness
* Linux Kernel Socket Data Buffering Denial of Service
* Linux Kernel URB and IPv6 Flowlabel Handling Denial of Service
* Linux Kernel "syscall()" Argument Handling Denial of Service
* Linux Kernel "is_hugepage_only_range()" Denial of Service
* Linux Kernel Multiple Vulnerabilities
* Linux Kernel Page Fault Handler Privilege Escalation
* Linux Kernel Multiple Vulnerabilities
* Linux Kernel Binary Format Loaders Privilege Escalation
* Linux Kernel Multiple Vulnerabilities
* Linux Kernel IGMP and "__scm_send()" Vulnerabilities
* Linux Kernel Local DoS and Memory Content Disclosure Vulnerabilities
* Linux Kernel smb Filesystem Implementation Multiple Vulnerabilities
* Linux Kernel ELF Binary Loader Setuid File Handling Vulnerabilities
* Linux Kernel ide-cd SG_IO Functionality Permission Bypass Vulnerability
* Linux Kernel NFS and ptmx Denial of Service Vulnerabilities
* Linux Kernel File Offset Pointer Handling Memory Disclosure Vulnerability
* Linux Kernel Sbus PROM Driver Multiple Integer Overflow Vulnerabilities
* Linux Kernel IEEE 1394 Driver Integer Overflow Vulnerabilities
* Linux Kernel Framebuffer Driver Direct Userspace Access Vulnerability

See Secunia for more information:
* http://secunia.com/product/2719/?task=advisories

[....]

Firefox should automatically use the package manager to install Flash, like Rhythmbox does with codecs.

Suggestion from:
http://contentconsumer.wordpress.com/2008/04/27/is-ubuntu-useable-enough-for-my -girlfriend/