Contributor aidave

OpenOffice 3.0 has gone final and should be included in the upcoming release of Ubuntu, Intrepid Ibex.

I know there has been a featurefreeze, but to keep out such a big update to one of the most popular programs on Ubuntu would be a mistake.

Brother has printer drivers available on their Linux page in Debian form (http://solutions.brother.com/linux/en_us/index.html). I recommend adding these Debian packages to the repos. Not all of them work flawlessly so not all of them should be added. I believe they are proprietary so I think they should be placed in the restricted repository. Either way, it's more drivers in the repos.

Currently the official Ubuntu repositories lack the following:
A. Updates to newer application versions in interim between distributions.
B. Updates to games, and newer games.
c. Updates to skins/ icons/ themes for either KDE or Gnome

There's two 3rd party repositories that exists to solve these problems:

Applications:
http://www.getdeb.net/
Features updated versions of application software

Games:
http://www.playdeb.net/
Features updated and comprehensive repository for games.


Skins:
https://launchpad.net/~kwwii/+archive

Please consider officially supporting these websites, or at least, allow easily discover-able method of adding them to the existing software database.

There are many great ideas here on brainstorm that have gotten a lot of votes, but no official Ubuntu feedback. I think whenever an idea reaches a certain amount of votes - lets say 500 - it should warrant feedback from the Ubuntu team. Something short like
'yep this is a good idea, we'll seriously consider it'
or
'that is an awful idea, forget it!'
would suffice, so one can better tell if popular ideas have a realistic chance of getting picked up or not.

Some ideas already have this kind of feedback (or even more detailed) but I think a high number of positive votes should always warrant official feedback.

(don't mark this as duplicate, the other idea combines wallpaper and sounds and is specifically against those sounds and wallpaper, this one is specifically about wallpaper and for continuing hardy's trend.)

Let me say this, every hardy review was complimenting ubuntu for the beautiful wallpaper. I personally loved it, and it was the first time the default ubuntu wallpaper actually made people interested in what OS I was running, I even kept variations of it for four months until just recently. Instead the beta ibex wallpaper is just ... well, I think plenty of criticism was told about it already, but I'll focus on my wish to see more wallpapers like hardy's one.

It would be very nice to let ubuntu always have an abstract wallpaper with a surrealistic painting of the version number's animal.

Ubuntu needs a personality, the idea to keep a brown-orange theme is a good one for this reason (as long as the theme looks good) cause we are not copying the competition. I really think that hardy's wallpaper was a step in a good direction and changing the direction now would be a bad idea.

Besides of the animal, I think the color choice for hardy's wallpaper was nice, with more live colors.

Some examples:
http://ubuntuarte.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/interpid_ibex_wallpa per_1_by_willwill100.png
http://ubuntuarte.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/la_cabra1600_06.png
http://gabuntu.wordpress.com/2008/08/25/wallpaper-para-intrepid-ibex/
also many examples here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Incoming/Intrepid/Desktop_Background_Submission s#Ibex%20-%20a_lecture_and_an_ibex

[....]

I am shocked at the Intrepid beta as I saw - what I thought to be - a blatant digression with the wallpaper and the login/logout sounds from Hardy to Intrepid.

I see for the sounds they made the packaging more freedesktop-friendly, but it still doesn't mean I like it.

Hardy
wall: http://staging.altonlabs.com/ubuntu/hardy.png
login: http://staging.altonlabs.com/ubuntu/hardy-login.wav
logout: http://staging.altonlabs.com/ubuntu/hardy-logout.wav

Intrepid
wall: http://staging.altonlabs.com/ubuntu/intrepid.png
login: http://staging.altonlabs.com/ubuntu/intrepid-login.ogg
logout: http://staging.altonlabs.com/ubuntu/intrepid-logout.ogg

(Feel free to use the links (temporarily) for your blogs. For the wallpapers, see ubuntu-wallpapers or /usr/share/wallapapers. For the sounds, see ubuntu-sounds /usr/share/sounds)

I personally - as a computer nerd - don't care much about the default wallpaper in an operating system as I know it can be changed, but first impressions mean a lot to others. It does mean a lot to me, however, as someone who is in marketing and who has been trained in design for a number of years.

[....]

I've seen a lot of complaints online about people watching someone type a password or whatever. There might be a way to solve that though:

Ubuntu could have a feature like a "disposable password" or something. Just a one time use only password that would be deleted after use and the user could set up several of them (and make new ones as they're used). The only thing would be that it would need to be kept away from the main password and users and groups things so that nobody gets confused.

This could be useful for those times when you're feeling really paranoid or someone is watching you type, or just for those times when you lend your computer to a friend for a day or something.

Example of context : I open several images from my desktop with gimp. I make some changes on the images and I want to save them in another format and with another name, all in the same folder.

Each time I will "save as" an image, the root context of the "save as" window will be my desktop. I would like to be able to easily come back to the last folder I used in the "saved as" window at least, and go more back in the "visited folders" history if needed.

I propose that the new version of gimp be put into 8.10.

It would help Windows users alot. Just a 'Copy' button next to 'Save', sort of similar to Windows' functionality when you press Print-Screen, but with the useful dialog. It could save alot of time if you just want to copy the screenshot.

At the beginning of each release cycle, the improvements other major distributions have made in their last release should be reviewed by the Ubuntu developers for their suitability to be integrated with Ubuntu. Many distributions have detailed lists available of all new features:

Fedora
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/10/FeatureList

OpenSuse
http://en.opensuse.org/Testing:Features_11.0

Mandriva
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Development/Ideas/Technical_specs_2008

This way we will get some new features for free and will avoid reinventing the wheel on other problems. Also it can be an inspiration to come up with even better solutions.

Currently the System Monitor is sort of worthless as a Windows-style Task Manager. When the system is frozen because of a buggy application, System Manager won't take the screen back, even when a keyboard shortcut is used to try to bring it up.

And often the keyboard shortcut assigned to killing applications won't come up either.

Both of these need to be more able to take over control of the desktop and dominate buggy applications.

Windows Task Manager has this ability, and will almost always come up no matter how many things have crashed.

Also, add links to shut down, reboot, or restart the windowing manager.

Canonical currently has a big problem. It needs developers. Its a vicious cycle, developers are needed to improve development, yet to increase the number of developers, we need better development programs.

The sad reality is that whilst Canonical has a wealth of development tools available, they are barely officially supported, out of date, or have no easy way of using them (like systemtap).

We need Canonical to step up and make the development environment for 9.04 a priority, so that first time linux developers, and long time developers have a powerful environment, that is officially supported by Canonical. By improving the development environment to be easy to setup, and more updated, developers are more likely to jump on board. In fact, whilst many developers consider coding on OSX to be a privilage, I have never heard the same said of Ubuntu.

Current areas we are severely lacking include:
- Eclipse is out of date in the repos and has been for ages.. Why?
- Sun and Apple have Dtrace officially supported, with a GUI frontend that really makes things easy. We don't have any support for systemtap nor have we got any comparable profiling gui.
- Windows and OSX has a fully supported out of the box development environment with the most popular languages in 2 clicks. With ubuntu, we have to manually work out which gui's we want, which tools, etc
- Debugging? Ha.. its actually quicker to port the code to OSX and use OSX's development tools in some cases then debug currently, because it supports step-backs and such.
- QT can compete against Cocoa. GTK even with Glade is a joke still. I'm not asking you to fix this, but if you want to encourage GTK development, at least have glade/eclipse integration in a developers metapackage
- Developers centre. Ubuntu has none, so developers aren't given a simple list of changes that might affect them next release, such as the change from Alsa as backend, to Pulse, so we can prepare in time. We don't even have a centralised way of really working together with other ubuntu developers.

Some may say developers can help themselves, but first impressions count. If it takes 3000 clicks to get your development environment to the standard provided by Apple in 5, whilst requiring you to also search for equivilent tools (such as dtrace which are considered standard for many OS's now) by yourself, you certainly wont prioritise the OS. By rewarding developers, with a better development environment, the end result will be a higher quality linux environment.

[....]

There is still no real rival to Microsoft Exchange as a business mail solution, although many stand alone tools exist, they are fragmented as a toolset and fragmented in their implimentation methods.

I'd like to work on an existing tool set (from my research Mozilla Thunderbird and Sunbird appear usable) to bring together functionality to make a usable base mail and calander and contact system that could be packaged into an mail solution for use with ubuntu and other linux distributions potentially.

There are other tools, I suggest these as they exist, have a usable code base and are not tied to a desktop release.

A general outline exists as such

1.) Server Package

An imap server - this is essentially exchange's mail solution, and allows online/offline messages while leaving content on the servers giving multiple clients and web clients the same view of the current mail.

A directory for contacts, ldap seems the obvious choice for this, more so if this is an business product, which would allow desktop general auth, mail auth and provide a contact directoy


A calander service, this needs to exist in the same form as "imap" where updates are made to the server but synced to local clients. I'm not aware of a product capable of this yet, but as sunbird uses sqlite backend, this seems possible at a high level. Used along side ldap auth, this would provide a powerful feature.

2.) a Desktop Package
Deployment of a mail and calander product (thunderbird/sunbird) deployment of ldap client

[....]

Right now the user gets the default brown color scheme upon install. I actually like this theme, but I tend to migrate towards a blue theme.

However for a lot of people, changing this is a hassle.

On the install, it would be nice to be able to pick, from a drop down, simply:

- Brown (Default)
- Blue
- Green
- Red
- etc

That will propagate the necessary theme changes.
And then new user accounts will all be like that when created.

Ubuntu already has a Desktop and Server edition. Yet what I think would help Ubuntu really succeed in the corporate/government world is an "Enterprise Edition". This would have out-of-the-box support for organizational email, group calendars, and would have less focus on "fun" applications installed (like games and cd extractor).

cheers!

A new, great version of VLC (0.9.2) has been released.

It would be really great to make an exception to the feature freeze rule and let this new version of VLC ship with Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex.

I'm sure most Ubuntu users will thank you for it!

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.

[....]

Ok, it's a VERY small point, but when Update Manager is launched, it says 'Your system is up to date.'

Then you click 'check' and find that it *isn't.*

This makes about as much sense as clicking 'Start' in Windows when you want to shut down, and it would be nice if Update Manager didn't tell you that you were up to date until AFTER you click 'check'.

You can get read-only files in several ways, but the most common way is to copy files to your computer from a CDROM. Is there any reason to keep read-only permissions when copying files from cdrom to hard disk?