Contributor blueglow

I have a Logitech LX-710 keyboard with a bunch of extra function keys, most of which I cannot program. I had a different keyboard before this one and the same was true. I can program the audio keys (which work by default) and the calculator key, but most others do not work. It would be great if Linux would generate scan codes for those extra keys so I could assign commands to them. The same is true of special mouse buttons.

One program I tried works with non-USB keyboards but claimed that kernel support was required for USB keyboards. Strangely, Enlightment recognizes quite a few more of the extra keys than Gnome does.

Ubuntu should include a way to add/remove fonts from a repository just like the add/remove program panel. When a user needs a new font, they could open up the window, and the program would download the latest repository fonts. The user could look through the fonts and choose which ones to install by simply checking a box and clicking "apply." A user could search for font keywords to find certain styles of fonts. For example, someone could search for keywords words "serif","sans serif","cursive", and the GUI would display fonts that match the search. This would be a killer tool for designers.

Furthermore, the GUI could be very helpful. When a user browses a font, a sample image of it could be automatically loaded so that the user can quickly find fonts that are appealing to them. A rating system or popularity gauge could be used so that the best fonts can be highlighted.

A tool like this would create inscentive for font designers to make their designs free/public. Credits could be given to designers in the font descriptions.

Expansion of Add Remove Programs - show user-provided descriptions, feature lists, screenshots, comments, ratings, integration with launchpad. Initial page should be top-rated apps, or newest apps. Managed by a webapp?

Or... leave it as it is, but create a website displaying all the great software available for ubuntu including all the features mentioned above with apturl links to install.

From #4613 (merged):

It should be indicated how much I'll have to download to install something.

We have download limits here and well... quite often I exceed them. It would be useful to indicate how big the download is going to be.

I think more Windows users would try out Ubuntu if they could just double click an .exe file instead of going into a command prompt, browsing to the folder and then typing "wine *.exe" to install the program.

I like how Ubuntu adds shortcuts on the desktop and the "start menu" after you install the program making it easy to run but installing Windows software needs to be easier.

I've got two monitors, and right now if I use the wallpaper settings in gnome it stretches the wallpaper across the two monitors. It does this even for the default ubuntu wallpaper. This can look really bad depending on the image. In order to get around this I had to get two wallpaper images and join them into one large one with the GIMP and set that as my wallpaper.

There should be a way in gnome to set a different wallpaper for each monitor.

==== Merged with ideas of a similar scope: Different wallpapers on different workspace ===

Many workspaces option in Linux allows you to separate your work, why not allow users to have different wallpapers on each workspace. This allows for easier identification of which workspace you are on.
When used with compiz-fusion you can rapidly switch between your workspaces and the different wallapaper will allow you to quickly recognise what desktop you are on.

Currently this is natively available in KDE but not in Gnome. In Gnome you can't even let Compiz take over the wallpaper control because Nautilus doesn't allow for transparent backgrounds.

Other solutions like Wallpapoz are slow and when switching between desktops it takes too long to switch WP.

Allow users to log into Ubuntu Forums and other Ubuntu sites (such as ubuntu brainstorm) using their OpenID.

Add an option to optimize Ubuntu to install, boot, and run faster on older PCs with limited memory and slower CPUs. This could be implemented on the Alternate Install CD.

Optimizations could include, for example, disabling non-essential daemons and services.

xubuntu only has a lightweight window manager; but under the hood it seems to have all the overhead of full Ubuntu.

By comparison, Slackware boots and runs much faster than Ubuntu (or the KDE-based Kubuntu) on any given PC. With proper tuning, Ubuntu should be able to match this performance, while keeping its usability advantages.

Powertop is kind of confusing, and it seems like actions taken with it expire after some time. Something graphical and permanent would be preferable, built into power management.

The default media player is called Totem Movie Player right? In the panel and the window heading it has this title, but in nautilus [when you right click for open-with] and the applications menu it is simply called 'Movie Player'.

It would be less confusing if the name was standardised across ubuntu

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?

This is probably not super-critical in this day and age of monolithically-sized hard-drives on the cheap, but it does pertain to smaller units such as the EeePC, and perhaps older machines.

Synaptic and Apt-Get have a great feature whereby the tool estimates the download size and expected drive usage upon installation, however it doesn't compare that value against the actual free drive space on the system. It is perfectly possible to attempt to download 100MB worth of updates that will consume 200MB of disk space after installation (total 300MB) when you only have 50MB of actual disk space free.

A simple query of the drive and a message dialog advising that the downloads and/or installation cannot be completed due to lack of space would save many a new user from tearing their hair out when Apt-Get kicks up a stink about being unable to perform any other task (such as removing apps to make space) because it has an unfinished installation that needs to be sorted out first.

I often make documents which I quickly need to save. In MS Word it then simply gives the first few words as filename option which you can then of course change as you like, but it is at least something.

If I save something in OOo it doesn't give anything. So if I need to save something I cannot simply click save > save. I need to think of a name. And although that is not a hard thing, if I'm in the rush of work and I got a document which simply should have the same title as the first few words in the document (eg. "friday-list for Bob") I want it to go quick.

It is a small thing, but it would make my life again a little bit easier. :-)

Show the gsm signal strength in the network manager gsm icon, similar to the wifi signal strength when connected to a gsm network.

Make an entry to "install-font" in the context menu when right-clicking a font file. The font would then be moved to the appropriate directory in the home folder. It took me a while to figure out how to install fonts!

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.

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I would love to see the PDT-Plugin in the repositories. (Even if PHP is "shitty" blabla... ;))

Games are not native to Linux,because there isn't any framework that exists in Linux.Linux gamers are casual or hobbyist i feel because they code in there favorite language[c++ etc]/there distro[eg fedora,opensuse].There real need of Linux in particular is to gather all developers interested,concerned,active.This is not a issue with just ubuntu or gnome or kde.every platform kde,gnome,saw fish etc, from every language coderc,objective c,c++,python,perl,qt etc ,from every language/country/distro should contribute.
To make gaming happen there should be a framework for gaming in Linux because a popular framework has solved browser and web based application problems in Linux example
web kit.Web Kit is an open source application framework that provides a foundation upon which to build a web browser.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webkit

A framework is a basic conceptual structure used to solve or address complex issues. This very broad definition has allowed the term to be used as a buzzword, especially in a software context.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framework
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_development
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_programming

Or SOFTWARE API like DirectX:
Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (API's) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms.
from a decade directx x travelled from pc to xbox.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX
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OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a standard specification defining a cross-language cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 2D and 3D computer graphics.

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Hey,

Why do i need to restart my pc to get the nvidia driver working?

insmod nvidia and a X restart should be enough right!

So with that knowledge again: Why do i need a restart?
It's not modifying the base kernel which is about the only thing that requires a restart on linux and you can only get it that far if you install a new kernel or compile a new one.

My suggestion:
Kick out the restart demand and just restart X.

Edit//
If you vote this idea down tell me why because i can't think of a reason where a reboot would be better then my suggestion.

Fedora is currently working on improving the startup experience by implementing Plymouth:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureBetterStartup

By doing this, transition from Grub to GDM (or KDM or whatever) would be done almost instantly. Plymouth will use a graphical boot mode with a fallback method to text for those computers that don't have hardware support.