Contributor Xan

Enable Nautilus to use tabs.

Nautilus is Ubuntu's default file management software. There is no reason why you should need to open countless Nautilus windows to manage your files. It is time to bring tabs from your web browser to your file browser.

User directories on ubuntu are easily a mess at the moment. They need more standardisation and more sense to remain clean. If you go to terminal/bash you may discover that your directory looks something like:


/home/auzy/Documents
/home/auzy/.Azureus (Hidden)
/home/auzy/.gnome2 (Hidden)
/home/auzy/Desktop
/home/auzy/.bashrc2 (Hidden)
/home/auzy/readme.rtf
/home/auzy/.Trash (Hidden)
/home/auzy/iffy.rtf
/home/auzy/delete me.rtf
/home/auzy/argggggg.c
/home/auzy/fgdhgfdhd.txt
/home/auzy/Music
/home/auzy/.ooffice (Hidden)
/home/auzy/friendsassignment.c
/home/auzy/friendsassignmentCopy.c
etc.


While you may note that anything with . is hidden normally, what if someone wants to delete the settings for a program? They need to manually unhide it, and sort through the dozens of directories in the home directory to find it. The problems with this is that:

a) Its messy, and certainly not a clean solution
b) Users cannot easily access their settings.
c) Everyones home directory is normally trashed with hundreds of other files, making it difficult to navigate.

[....]

I guess everybody has experienced the rather long boot up times in Ubuntu (particularly with laptops). I know they are already working on it, but the change from feisty to gutsy was a pain in the ass in terms of boot up speed.
A default WinXP installation beats Ubuntu's boot up time by far!! That shouldn't be allowed fellas!!

I therefore propose to the development team (both Ubuntu and by extension Gnome)to work on the improvement of boot up times in Ubuntu systems.

Ubuntu server edition 8.04 has many security features _by default_, overall in kernel (http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/serveredition/features/security)

Address Space Layout Randomisation, Stack protection, Heap protection, Non-executable memory, etc.

Please port these features to desktop edition for desktop users could enjoy too.

Currently there is no way to easily share files between multiple local users. I am talking about full read-write access to particular folder, eg. music folder.

Example: Alice and Bob uses the same computer. Alice has read access to Bob's home folder. Bob has read access to Alice's home folder. They want to fully share (read/write) their music. So they should ideally create /home/music folder, put all the music there and use it. Everything Bob puts into there, Alice should be able to read and remove, and vice versa. This is currently impossible in Ubuntu. Bob has to manually fix permissions every time Alice wants to delete something Bob's (Bob creates /home/music/Britney, but Alice can't delete /home/music/Britney/song1.mp3).

I have discussed this issue with several linux gurus and there is currently no easy nor difficult way to achieve this in Linux on the same (ext3) partition. With every proposed solution I can give you counterexample (group permissions, ACLs, local Samba, local NFS, etc - there is always problem when moving files). There would have to be created utility to set shared folders and some daemon would have to monitor changes and modify permissions.

Currently the easiest solution known for me is to share files on separate (ironically) NTFS partition, because when mounting NTFS you can force user/group/permissions on file access. What a shame, we use Microsoft technologies just to share files between Ubuntu users.

This problem is quite serious, give it a thought or two. Everyone who is not using Ubuntu computer alone and wants to share music/films/etc between multiple users knows what I am talking about.

//New info:
Atany has proposed in the comment that BindFS project can be used to achieve this functinality:
http://code.google.com/p/bindfs/
I have tried it and it works very well. Developers which would like to implement this idea should have a look on BindFS, it's very promising tool, it could provide all necessary background for this.

Synchronizing between computers is currently impossible. I have a laptop and a desktop , and despite attempts with rsync, unison, ifolder, even with using ftp drives (which is not easy) I am unable to move files. this is beyond the simple networking problems, i want folders to synchronize. mainly just documents/homework. If i could go beyond that, to actually incorporated program files, such as firefox extensions, great. but the fact that I, after 2 months of trying, cannot find a way to have easily access/store files on 2 machines makes it very hard to solely use ubuntu.

Please do not doubt my faith though, as I have actually converted 7ppl!!! to date. 4 in my frat, 2 out, and my girl!

In idea #2806 it was proposed to add a download cap to Synaptic.

I think that full control (and measurement) of the bandwidth for each application would be more flexible. You may think I'm crazy wanting to limit my bandwidth when the whole planet wants to increase it, but I think that the feature is much needed in the following cases:

- to control applications without built-in BW control (synaptic, firefox, etc)
- when the ISP imposes volume limits
- in places where one is accounted or monitored for traffic
- when the PC should not be seen uploading or downloading in an uncontrolled way (in schools, universities, work this will immediately trigger alarms)

Personally, on Windows I cannot live without Netlimiter, which apart from BW control has a very nice per-app firewall, displays charts, stats, connections and a lot of other vital info per network adapter.

Perhaps I'm describing a new utility rather than an Ubuntu idea, but since I don't know whether it is supported by the kernel and/or tcp/ip I have to post it as an Ubuntu networking idea.

Replace initscripts with upstart events. Our boot sequence is currently slow, full of race conditions and poor interactions, especially with competition between the series of tasks run by sysv-rc, udev and sometimes just with the kernel. We developed upstart so that we could have a truly event driven boot sequence that would be fast, reliable and flexible; we should take advantage of it.

Lot of people have ubuntu + other operating system installed in his/her computer (FreeBSD, windows, etc.)

Now for accessing to this system, we could reboot computer and dont select ubuntu (in grub menu). It could be good if we have virtualized access to these OS: in any OS present in grub menu, ubuntu could virtualize them (with qemu, virtualbox, etc.).

So ubuntu users could run your OS at the same time that ubuntu and copy and share information among that.

ZFS Features

* Pooled Storage Model
* Always consistent on disk
* Protection from data corruption
* Live data scrubbing
* Instantaneous snapshots and clones
* Fast native backup and restore
* Highly scalable
* Built in compression
* Simplified administration model

Source code:
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/source

What Is ZFS?
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/whatis/

ZFS:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS


FreeBSD has ported ZFS:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2006-August/065306.html
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/7.0R/announce.html

[....]

Graphical GRUB with easy and advanced recover and backup system options


The Ubuntu GRUB would have extra options:
- Backup and recover of the system
- Access to the secondary kernel versions list
- Memory Test
- Recovery Mode.

See the Blueprint below

Blueprint
734 x 1024 px
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3076/2565372159_1fe09da5c6_b.jpg

1749 x 2441 px for download
Copy and paste the link in your browser to start the download, for viewing.
http://lh3.google.com/nq6.studio/R8m3O_x-smI/AAAAAAAAAZs/2ZU53X2YNWM/Grub-EN.jp g?imgdl=1

I developed a Blueprint of how all this would be, making possible the graphical visualization of my ideas. I'm sure that all of it is easy to implement, because the tools to realize these processes already exist.

With this we would have a more organized GRUB, and with options that a lay person would know how to deal with in case of a wrong configuration of the system, recovering it on accessing the essentials backup files of configuration. Or in a worse case, even the entire partition image, where the problem is unrecoverable even with the recovering of the system files.

[....]

Now is says that the currently loaded plugins do not provide means to burn such disks.

Ubuntu (as of Gutsy) can not mount and read multisession cd/dvd's written in Nero or windows, or even by Brasero or K3B(Ubuntu apps).

This is such a serious bug. If a user (be he/her novice or advanced) can not access the cd / dvd he needs on his/her computer, then its an issue of paramount importance.

Please, put tomoyo [http://tomoyo.sourceforge.jp/] in Ubuntu universe.

TOMOYO Linux is a MAC (Mandatory Access Control) implementation for Linux. It was developed by NTT DATA CORPORATION, Japan and is available under the GPL license.

TOMOYO Linux consists of patch files to vanilla kernel and userland tools. Patch files are provided for both 2.4 and 2.6. For the user's convenience, various binary packages are also available.

TOMOYO is an alternative to AppArmor.

Thanks,
Xan.

More references:
[1] [http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Linux_Weather_Forecast/security]
[2] [http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/TOMOYO_Linux]

This issue is something I face regularly and thats why I'm posting it here.

I want a right click option on the updates in Update Manager which allows me to lock the version of a software and not update it. I know this functionality exists somewhere in Synaptic Package Manager, but still it would be convenient.

Example:
I have nvidia card on desktop and there was an intel video driver update recently, so it came up in Update Manager. I didn't want to install it obviously, so I unchecked it. But still every time I boot up, it shows new updates are available, and I see only that intel driver. If I get a 'do not update option' it would be handy.

Thanks

[Disclaimer: English isn't my language - please forgive the errors in what follows]

Most of the software is written in English. Then the strings it contains are translated to various target languages, but at release time, some applications are only partially translated.

For example, an app may come with an "Edit" menu containing the following items (in French):

Annuler
-------
Couper
Copy --> still in English
Coller
-------
Tout sélectionner

To solve this problem, I suggest that *every* string in *every* app has an unique ID. When the user sees an untranslated string, she/he should be able to translate it using a special combination (e.g. Ctrl-Alt-Shift-Click or whatever).

The system would then show a popup dialog to type in the translated version of the string, and this translated version (this is the important part):

- is stored locally, so that the item is *immediately* translated locally
- is sent, along with its unique ID, to a central translation database so that other users may benefit trom the translation

Convert the whole system to use secure techniques: PIE along with PaX, SSP, Grsecurity, frandom, fortify_source, heap consistency checking, mudflap, temporary file hardening.
Some of these techniques have been already incorporated upstream (PIE, SSP). PaX is better, than Execshield, while Grsecurity is more handy compared to SELinux. Ubuntu could outperform Fedora's security measures.
Two most important things are:
1.) guidelines applied on all packages to conform with security features (removing TEXTRELs, making X and multimedia applications PIE & SSP compliant, taking care of C++ code)
2.) developing a structured policy handling and configuration tool for Grsecurity's RBAC.
These two things could make Ubuntu more secure compared to other distros (like Fedora using Execshield and SELinux).
Already established improvements could be taken from HLFS and Gentoo Hardened.

Motto: every single desktop user needs protection even if they are not security experts.

Please, audit the lines of code of ubuntu.

The main security problems are due to writing code without auditing.

If you do, perhaps an openssl-like incidents [1] were more dificult to happen.

I think it's hard to do, but if other OS [2] do, why not us?

[1] [https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/openssl-blacklist/+bug/230193]
[2] www.openbsd.org

for this reasons:

1) Most people use several navigators: firefox, links, nautilus, galeon, konqueror, .... and have several bookmarks on it. But now the bookmarks in each navigator are isolated. You have manually to export and import the bookmarks in every navigator... and hugh task

2) Ideally if you want to share your bookmarks among several local users. Now if two users of the same computers want to share a directory of bookmarks, the best option is to import and export bookmarks....

Good if in firefox (and in future in any navigator) you could "save bookmarks in the server" (or save bookmarks as traditionally, in ~/)

I believe we need to be proactive about the security of our systems. Also, I think Fedora fully uses SELinux for all of there default desktop applications.

Security should not be an add-on after the fact. We also should endeavor to make sure people's first reaction is not to turn it off. Fedora has failed at that with SELinux, many guides have that as their first step after installing.

This would also require a GUI for notifying a user of a security breach (and allowing them to allow it?)