Contributor aliencam

It would be nice if the standard dictionary included with Ubuntu could be spruced up a bit. Here are some ideas:

* Keep a copy of the dictionary database on the computer, so that you can access it offline. As of right now, I can't look up a word if I'm out on the lawn typing. It could be updated when the computer has an internet connection. (Manually/Automatically?)
* Show results as you type. For example, if I typed "tre" in, I would get everything from 'treacherous' to 'trey' displayed in a list from which I could select the word I wanted. This would update as I continued typing.
* Have automatic hyperlinking from all the words in the definitions. If I look up "oxygen", and I don't know what a 'silicate' is, I should be able to double-click on that word and be taken to its definition (back and forward buttons would be useful here)
* Show the thesaurus by default.
* Have a more standard dictionary database. I'm not sure about licensing, but if we could access reference.com 's database, that would be great. Also, let the user select the databases they want to use.
* Tie in all other dictionaries (OpenOffice, Firefox) to one central database for spellchecking. Spellcheck should be a global feature, with every program using one database which would be editable through a GUI or the program you are using.
* Make an overall prettier GUI, but clean and simple. All I want is a search bar, a definition area, and maybe a menu or two where I can customize the above ideas.

Please collaborate with scanner manufacturers to write a standard USB device class and protocol for all scanners, so that every scanner built for the standard will work with any driver written for the standard.

http://www.ideastorm.com/article/show/10089668/create_a_standard_USB_device_cla ss_for_scanners

Social networks are very popular nowadays, but computers are very individual, we don't use possibilities of wifi cards in our notebooks.

I want go to my friend with notebook, she easily share her internet connection through wifi from her adsl/lan internet.

I want easy communicate, share files, talk with her through our wifi connection.

I want come to school, make small ad-hoc wifi network with my colleagues, play games, share with them my data, communicate, make temporary small chat room... Someone add internet to our wlan, through mobile.

In old times, we make small/big lan parties, why there isn't wlan parties ? I know internet is faster, but we can share without internet.

It means:
* easy connect ad-hoc with other devices (notebooks with whatever OS, smart phone (Windows mobile, symbian, iphone)
* easy choose ipadress, easy create dhcp-server
* easy create bridge to share internet connection
* easy create rules of connection (firewall)

In future
* easy make ad-hoc wlan
* easy communication through wlan, maybe ad-hoc jabber networks

In order to promote the gaming side of Ubuntu, it could be launched a "Games for Ubuntu" contest. This contest could be positive in two aspects:

-Attract game developpers to Ubuntu
-Provide more games to the gamers that use Ubuntu

The contest could have just one or several games categories (for instance, shooters, puzzles, strategy, etc.). This would not only promote the development of new games for Ubuntu, it could also encourage existing teams to finalize their projects in order to present them to the contest.

The price could be something material or something more symbolic (like a trip to the Ubuntu central offices) in order not to overcharge the organizational costs.

One interesting way for raising the quality of the games presented would be providing some kind of resources, like kits for developing 3D games, wikis about technical aspects, forums for contacting with programmers, musicians, graphic artists, etc.

Create a place where we linux users can shout out to the world "WE WANT TO PLAY ON UBUNTU LINUX"

Let us all sign and show the big companies that we exist and we are a potential marked that grows more and more every day!

Instead of asking the ubuntu team to make games work with ubuntu linux (which is quite stupid, hows that suposed to work and how much waste of development would that be?) make the gaming companies see that we exist and want support! Dont let all our requests get scattered and ignored over the www, make them all meet and bundle at one official ubuntu page.

There are games done for windows, mac, wii, ps3, psp and all other plataforms, why not ubuntu linux?

If the gaming world is able to visit a page and see "xxxxxxx ubuntu linux users want to play games!" why shouldnt they start doing it? It should be much easyer to develop games for a WORKING OS then for windows, with all its bugs and problems. That would mean less work for them, less support needed and more fun for us!

Please ubuntu team! Help us shout out!

PS: that can also be used for other types of applications, but I think games are the sollution to give Ubuntu the suport it needs. Games for Ubuntu bring working hardware for ubuntu (remember the nvidia logo before each game? "the way its meant to be played"?) and support from all companies who sell things to gamers.
Gaming mouses/keyboards joysticks... every big hardware company has something for gamers. If they start producing working drivers for that section, the other products will follow.

When I got error messagebox while incorrect mounting of a NTFS drive, I can't select its text content to later use.
All displayed text must be selectable & copyable.

Currently, the gnome-panel uses an insane amount of RAM. Some users have reported it using up to 110mb of RAM! We cannot let something so small be such a huge memory hog!

(Note: This idea is different to #368 - excessive ram usage as this is an idea for a specific issue)

In gnome, most applications (ie pidgin, tracker), refer to the "notification area" as the "system tray" - and they use the space meant for notifications (according to the HIC) as a system tray ala windows. This needs to commit one way or another (only use it for notifications, or change the HIC and call it a system tray).

If a user accidentally deletes their system tray, it can be quite confusing to find it; google can eventually tell them that "system tray" == "notification area", but this is a usability issue that needs fixing.

One of the suggestions powertop (a tool that helps to save battery power) told me is to turn off my notebook's bluetooth when it is not being used.
"Disable the unused bluetooth interface with the following command:
hciconfig hci0 down; rmmod hci_usb"

I think it would be nice to have a way to turn off/on bluetooth graphically using bluetooth applet.

When a USB stick (or some other kind of data storage) is pulled out, while something is written on it or while part of the data is still cached in the RAM, freeze all file operations to the device and demand it to be plugged in again. After it is plugged in again, complete the remaining operations and unmount the device.
If the warning dialogue is canceled by the user, then cancel all operations and regard the device as unmounted.

edit: Thanks to Auzy for finding the very good description of this in http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/1515/ which was lost due to being incorrectly marked as a duplicate of something completely different.

Early, when first computers arrive, it be equipped with monochrome text display, green or gray symbols on black background. The big advantages is it was eye-friendly (because no extra light energy put to the eye) and no matter of refresh rate (again saving your eyes).
Nowadays, when GUI is most-displayed environment, at Microsoft's hand (or no?) the white background brings to standard de-facto. The reason was "the documents in MSWord looks same as on paper, WYSIWYG or so). But no one worry about people's eyes.
Super-bright displays also burn out our eyes.
The solution is turn back to black background, and using white only when preview docs before printing.
Many years I try to set this color sheme on both Windows and then Ubuntu. But always were elements which out-of-control of colors, when programmers use 'black' color instead of 'current scheme symbol's color.
Another example out-of-control items is baloon tooltips in Ubuntu, address & search lines in Firefox, and many more.
A great advantage is 'invert' function of Compiz. It fixes all! But photos looks terrible...
I suggest that developers of Ubuntu must include at least one TESTED dark scheme in distro.
Thanks a lot!

(I added) Important note: 'dark' theme is not gray, but almost black. Absolutely need that *every* letter of text must be more bright than it's background. Including input boxes on web pages, balloon messages, comments displayed when mouse stay on picture.

nautilus is really easy to use and powerful yet very slow.
i am speaking in terms of loading a folder.
suppose i have a folder having 1000 files then nautilus takes more than 5 seconds to load while other file managers load them instantaneously.
and if it takes too long nautilus shows very irritating message " opening folder you can cancel this operation " or something like that.
this may be a solutions to this .
1) in back end any database can be maintained which can take all records of the file present.(i.e indexing)
this will help in two ways
a) will make search faster (the default one which comes with
nautilus).
b) grabbing the folder details will be faster .
2) load instantly without any preview and icons and ones it is loaded then change the icons and preview.

this will make nautilus lot more faster.

and sorry for that big spelling mistake .. its nautilus :P i guess

Canonical should hire at least one full-time developer for X.org and GNOME.

X Server 1.4.1 was delayed by 212 days. X is used by pretty much every distribution, and not only Linux also other operating systems, so it is a very important package. We need the bugs fixed, such as EDID. We need new features such as input hotness, XKB 2, Xi 2 and MPX, etc.

Zenwalk Linux have a Xorg developer, we should have at least one too.

GNOME is also one of the most important packages in Ubuntu, and we should have a developer for it too, so we can make Ubuntu more powerful, functional and friendly.

I think some of the screenshots on www.ubuntu.com are outdated.

For example, the menu screenshot on this page: http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu is not the menu we see in 8.04.

Also, some text is outdated as well. For example, this page: http://www.ubuntu.com/products/WhatIsUbuntu/kubuntu says "KDE version 3.5.5 is the current stable release".

There are lots of other examples on the website. I think to use up-to-date screenshots is very important. They would give new users a better and more accurate impression of Ubuntu compared with old screenshots.

it's exactly like http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/5873/ only i'm talking about putting the monitor to sleep..

During a system installation, if you preserve your home directory, the system should detect there is already existing users in there and offer to create those users automatically through the usual method that it normally does if the user doesn't exist in the system yet.

This would make moving/restoring a home directory from one system to another so useful then. Even better would be that you can import a /home directory from another system and then be offered to import the users that are in that home directory. This way if you're moving from one system to another, it would make it so easy. It would be very mac like if you ask me.

To help make sure you're not using someone's home directory from another distro, a simple config file that indicates what distro it was used in last would be appropriate. We could start with ubuntu and the version number in there. This way all Ubuntu has to check is that file and what distro it was created in or used last in. If it's a supported distro and there isn't problems with it, then offer to create a new user to match that home directory.

It could also check for all the .config files in the users home directory to see if it can import them into the users new home directory. If any .config files exist that it doesn't recognize, it doesn't copy them in.

You usually click "about" menu entries, if you want to know which version of a program you are running, so that you can ask for help on the internet.
Therefore the "about Ubuntu" menu entry in "System" should show the currently running kernel version and the version of xorg.

Often after doing an update the double arrow icon will appear indicating a need to reboot. But if you click it, no reason is given as to why reboot is needed.

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

Pidgin saves account passwords in plain text (check the contents of ~/.purple/accounts.xml )

Saving passwords in plain text is wrong! The Gnome keyring is a perfect replacement for this insecure method and should be used.

Given the success (as far as I know) of your Dell partnership, please do everything possible to seek alliances with other vendors, as it will reinforce the idea that Ubuntu is a viable alternative to other operating systems and will provide better hardware support for current Ubuntu users.

Dell is offering new models based on Ubuntu (recently the XPS M1330 in a few countries), proof that the business model makes sense.