http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com guidelines and check if your idea has been posted already! ]]> en-us Tue, 02-Dec-2008 00:00:00 UTC Tue, 02-Dec-2008 00:00:00 UTC QAPoll module http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/15990/
Some information and benchmarks about this:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/2007-December/002702.html
P.S. Sorry for bad english


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No attachments. ]]> Tue, 02-Dec-2008 00:00:00 UTC http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/15990/ http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/15995/
EDIT: 1 initial point that represents the vote of the submiter, and once sent he/she will not be able to vote again.

That is.

NOW: I submit one idea, once submitted, I have to vote it (my own idea, ins't it a bit strange?).

PROPOSED MODIFICATION: I submit one idea, once submitted, it has my vote, so it has +1 points, and I can't vote again (of course).

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No attachments. ]]> Tue, 02-Dec-2008 00:00:00 UTC http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/15995/ http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/15393/
I propose to add an emblem for encrypted private directories.

Crappy mockup;
* http://img399.imageshack.us/img399/5443/emblemky7.png

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No attachments. ]]> Tue, 02-Dec-2008 00:00:00 UTC http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/15393/ http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/136/
A couple of ideas for how to help them have come up, including an idea about having pop-ups for every new application that's open. The pop-up idea has a few downsides, of course, not the least of which being that pop-ups are annoying to many users, both new and experienced.

One relatively unobtrusive way to introduce new users to the basic functions of Ubuntu is to show a slideshow during the installation process. New users would probably watch the slideshow (they're waiting for the installation to finish--what else are they going to do?), while experienced users might have the option to turn off the slideshow... or they may just get up and leave, knowing that the installation won't take more than fifteen minutes.

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Blueprint ubiquity-slideshow: [Information on this blueprint will be retrieved soon]
Ubuntuforums.org thread #411481
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No attachments. ]]> Tue, 02-Dec-2008 00:00:00 UTC http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/9462/ http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/4529/
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No attachments. ]]> Tue, 02-Dec-2008 00:00:00 UTC http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/4529/ http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/10021/
My idea is that clicking on the icon (or a "Why?" link for more information) should indicate why the OS thinks a reboot is needed so I can make a decision about whether to do it now or later.

my other ideas

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No attachments. ]]> Tue, 02-Dec-2008 00:00:00 UTC http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/10021/ http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/15228/
Some examples with Intrepid :

* CD drives eat your fingers (LP: #283316)
* GNOME session is not remembered (LP: #249373)
* Bluetooth file reception cannot be set with the default tools (LP: #290875) and doesn't work anymore by the way (LP: #211252, LP: #289836)
* Samba printers can't print when no authentication is needed (LP: #283811)

I mean basic printing, burning/using CDs not working in a 2008 operating system, than can't be real, right ?

My (humble) proposal :

* Any default feature that was previously working and is not working anymore should be a release blocker (of course explicit exception could be granted on a case by case basis).
* There should be an easy way in launchpad to mark and track such regressions.
* Release dates should be planned in the beginning of the month instead of the very end of the month so that if more time is needed we won't have to renumber the release.

The fact that Intrepid release notes are so big should be an other indication as to why it was too early to release Intrepid IMHO.

I'm not whining or blaming anybody here, I can fix all these problems for my specific computers. However I think that users expect that what was working before will continue to work in the new release (I'm not speaking about performance regressions, regressions in packages not in main here, I know that we cannot avoid every regression). This is far more important than releasing on the exact planned day.


( Some other comments can be found on my blog post : http://ernstfamily.ch/jonathan/2008/11/avoiding-feature-regressions/ )


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No attachments. ]]> Tue, 02-Dec-2008 00:00:00 UTC http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/15228/ http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/15709/
I use IMAP for email, and IMAP can offer IDLE support, where the server notifies the email client that email's arrived.

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

Thunderbird has this, and it means I never have to get Get/Send, I get notified as soon as email comes, and it generally makes email a lot more convenient.

I'd love it if Evolution finally got IDLE support.

Upstream bug is
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=233428

There's talk about adding it in Evo 2.26
http://www.go-evolution.org/Evo2.26
but they said the same thing about Evo 2.24

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No attachments. ]]> Tue, 02-Dec-2008 00:00:00 UTC http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/15709/ http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/15700/
Ubuntu establishes an *abstraction layer* for sync devices. Even if it only has the smallest of small functionality, it can grow with stuff. It's aiming to provide some functionality with everything - and then provides a consistent api to the desktop that someone else can then use to write software that interacts with syncing devices.

Even if all it did was:
- detect that a mobile device had been connected,
- provide a function to determine what kind of mobile device that is (Palm, Windows Mobile, Ubuntu Mobile, iPhone, etc.),
- and then made the device consistently accessible in the same /dev/ node, that would do absolute wonders for those of us who want to use our portable devices with Ubuntu.

Providing this limited functionality will actually be a massive help, and then people can write consistent scripts and programs to extend the usability of mobile devices easily.

Examples:

1) I plug my Palm into USB... it appears on /dev/mobile01 - not matter which release, I know it will be available on mobile##.

2) I also connect my phone with Bluetooth... it appears on /dev/mobile02

3) I've set up some scripts to use the other sync apps that I need... they can detect whether /dev/mobile01 and /dev/mobile02 exist, and the script can easily find out whether the device is something it supports by calling "sync-hal -t /dev/mobile01" or something like that.

If that's ALL the abstraction layer did, that would save me HOURS and HOURS. Simply guaranteeing my lifedrive will be detected is a bonus.

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No attachments. ]]> Tue, 02-Dec-2008 00:00:00 UTC http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/15700/ http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/15003/
The benefits are of course that we as a community generate usage data that reflects many more scenarios than ubuntu devs can run through on their limited time.

The data may potentially leak sensitive information; I wouldn't want canonical to know that $app accesses /home/jonas/trade-secrets,illegal-mp3z,kiddie-pr0n, so some sanitizing has to be done. Someone can sweat the details later, but I guess it's safe to lump /home/$USER/** into one bucket and show access to every individual file owned by a package. The user should have some input on how the sanitizing is done.

Assuming sanitizing is doable, a daemon would collect the data and generate a, say, weekly report, which would be submitted to Canonical. Optionally, the daemon would ask the user [notification-area baloon thing maybe] to review the report for confidential information before sending it.

What are the attacks and trust relationships? It would be bad if Canonical blindly trusted the reports it got; not because most people who install this are evil, but because someone [say, a competitor] might generate false data, leading to bad profiles and decreased acceptability of Ubuntu.

It would be useful to measure the interrater reliability here (that is, how often do two random people agree on the data), and to detect factions of internally agreeing but externally disagreeing data. If people agree, have a developer look at the agreed-upon data set(s), do some sanity checks, and stuff it into the apparmor-profiles package :)

Another attack is denying Canonical the data. But that's allowed for, as it's on a volunteer basis.

Comments? Good-yes-no? ;)

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No attachments. ]]> Tue, 02-Dec-2008 00:00:00 UTC http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/15003/ http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/15522/
When you report a duplicate, there's a text field that wants an idea number.

That means you have to open a new tab, navigate to brainstorm.ubuntu.com and find the idea you think it's a dupe of.

It would be much easier if the page had a search, similar to how "Submit Idea" has. Then you just search for some keywords, and see if any of the ideas are the ones you had in mind. If you know it's a dupe, you can probably recognize the idea it's a dupe of by its title.


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No attachments. ]]> Tue, 02-Dec-2008 00:00:00 UTC http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/15522/ http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/15544/ http://docs.fedoraproject.org/install-guide/f9/en_US/sn-automating-installation.html

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Bug #297232 : [Information on this bug will be retrieved soon]
]]> Tue, 02-Dec-2008 00:00:00 UTC http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/15544/ http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/15530/
Here's some use cases:

- Everybody in my house should be able to print on the one printer attached to my desktop.

- Most laptops don't have a joystick port. I want to plug my joystick into my desktop and use it while playing games on my laptop.

- My desktop doesn't have a bluetooth interface. I want to use a wiimote to control mplayer on my desktop box.

- I want my mouse and keyboard plugged into my desktop so that I can log in on it without moving wires. But I want them to appear plugged into my laptop when I'm at home (:= my laptop can see my wifi AP), and I don't want to plug them in and out whenever I come home or leave. [synergys on the desktop doesn't work for playing nexuiz on the laptop].

- I want to move sound around on my home network (http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/15119/).

- I want to use CPU speed on my desktop when compiling on my laptop (distcc helps me).

- I want my mouse and keyboard to control all my computers, such that the mouse does an "edge flip" onto the screen of the next computer [synergy helps here].

- I want to access the files on my desktop from my laptop transparently [sshfs, nfs or samba helps here; make it easy to do securely if sshfs is not the default, I don't trust my switch to never be a hub].

And I bet you can come up with something even more cool and useful.


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No attachments. ]]> Tue, 02-Dec-2008 00:00:00 UTC http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/15530/ http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/15547/
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No attachments. ]]> Tue, 02-Dec-2008 00:00:00 UTC http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/15547/ http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/3808/ just like arch linux

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No attachments. ]]> Tue, 02-Dec-2008 00:00:00 UTC http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/3808/ http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/6739/
Then we can have the Bruce Schneier seal of approval; "The cryptographic features of this operating system are deemed secure by Bruce Schneier!".

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No attachments. ]]> Tue, 02-Dec-2008 00:00:00 UTC http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/6739/ http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/13323/
Pretty straightforward as far as Brainstorm ideas go.

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No attachments. ]]> Tue, 02-Dec-2008 00:00:00 UTC http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/13323/ http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/7212/
It also means they can take into account user usage patterns ie. 1)
- "heavy ubuntu users" will vote for every day annoyances, that are small, but annoying generally.
- "intermittant users", are more likely to vote for showstoppers, reasons which force them to often switch to windows. Implementing these will increase the heavy usage crowd.
- People who have "never used it", will more likely vote for ideas, which involve marketing, bugs that prevent them installing it, or safety concerns over their data which should be addressed, or addressed better so they will use it (these are probably more likely to be easy to address).

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No attachments. ]]> Tue, 02-Dec-2008 00:00:00 UTC http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/7212/