Contributor cmr

Many people haven't heard of eBox and its integration with Ubuntu. The webpages and documentation for Ubuntu Server Edition should recommend eBox for users seeking a way to graphically configure services.

this may save bandwitch

more: http://ubuntu-tutorials.com/2008/03/20/how-to-disable-prefetching-in-firefox/

In some cases the network-manager give my computer the ip 0.0.0.0 . :-( network-manager shows always no error and a can't connect to my network. It should show me a cause!

The "Update Manager" steals focus several time.

When I click the Reload button in update-manager, the "Downloading package information" progress dialog takes a few seconds to start, with the main window's widgets disabled. In this case, I switch to another application, and the download progress steals the window focus. If I switch again to another window, the "building dependency tree" progress dialog steals focus again.

** This idea is pretty similar to idea 5237 but still different. This one ask for a update-manager which does not steal focus while the other ask for the possibility to automatically install updates without showing any window.

I'm not sure if this is fixed by using PulseAudio but i find the volume control in gnome is way too linear. Because of this the user has very little control with extreme loud and quiet volumes. For example, when reducing the volume it will decrease to a certain level then suddenly just go silent. Much more control would be given with a logarithmic scale.

This page explains it much better: http://sound.westhost.com/project01.htm

When Ubuntu boots, you see the Ubuntu logo and a progress bar.

That is good, new users wont get scared by the geeky stuff.

But as an advanced user, sometimes I kinda would like to see whats going on, what is really happening.

So it would be nice if I could press the "Esc" key, and it would switch from graphical boot, to show the geeky text stuff on start up.

You know, stuff like:
NET: Registered protocol family 2
IP route cache hash table entries: 32768 (order: 5, 131072 bytes)
TCP established hash table entries: 131072 (order: 8, 1048576 bytes)
TCP bind hash table entries: 65536 (order: 7, 524288 bytes)
TCP: Hash tables configured (established 131072 bind 65536)
TCP reno registered
checking if image is initramfs... it is
Freeing initrd memory: 7221k freed

Having the new Amazon mp3 download software is a great first step. But what we need to persuade Amazon to do is create a version of the downloader that works directly in our music applications via a plugin, so you can purchase music directly in your application much the same way you can purchase tunes directly from iTunes.

One thing that always throws me when using Rhythmbox is the way the Play button is a pause button when playing a song but the icon remains a "play" icon. So in order to pause a song you have to press a play icon again. This is really bad interface design.

Every other music app I've ever used has the icon change to denote the new function. When the button plays its a play icon and when it pauses its a pause icon. Why doesn't rhythmbox do this?

It's very convenient to mount an FTP or SSH server via Nautilus for quick updates to a website. However, I'm forced to use GEdit to edit text files mounted through Nautilus. GEdit is ok, but vim is such a beautiful editor for the power user/programmer.

Especially with the new GVFS, please work on support for GVim to access the keychain and be useable via right-click on any Nautilus-mounted filesystem.

Currently, the default Permissions on any file copied from a FAT32 device -- such as a camera or flash drive -- is read-write for the original user (Owner) and no-access for everyone else. I've been trying to research how to manually change this and it's waaaay too complicated. The technical goal here is to automatically change the Group Owner to the user's Group and set the Group Permissions to Read+Write. Since FAT32 doesn't include a Group Permission property the current behavior is to treat it as null(?) and treat it as Group Owner=Root, Group Permission=None

It seems to me that there are several ways this could be improved, any of which would probably be sufficient:

1. The default Photo Import option is gthumb. I personally find it bizarre and confusing to use but if it changed the Permissions for me I would try to use it.

2. There's an GUI configuration under System > Preferences > Removable Drives and Media. Maybe add an option in there (and default it to "Make all files shareable")

3. Change the fstab/udev/whatever configuration that controls the default auto-mount options for these FAT32-type drives.

P.S. Here is the URL for my most recent attempt to workaround this myself (so far without success),
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=4489509

I don't know what Ubuntu's policy would be in terms of using the site to make money with links to outside sites, so feel free to vote this down if its commercialism upsets you, but it just occurred to me...

If Ubuntu had a really nice hardware database could you not generate money towards Ubuntu by having a small "check for prices" type link beside hardware.

Ie. I see a Logitech webcam that is voted 5 out 5 by the social voting system you would want to implement in a new hardware database site. Beside that 5 out of 5 rating I see a link to compare prices/and or buy. Bobs your uncle you generate some money and it helps to pay for the continued excellence of Ubuntu.

file-roller can open rar archives only with the non-free unrar package. It should be able to leverage the free unrar-free package if that's what the user has chosen.

Big problem that not only affects firefox 2, it also happens on firefox 3 beta and hasn't been resolved yet.

I get at least 4 or 5 crashes daily on older hardware. But even on new modern hardware i still get 1 or 2 crashes.

As everyone knows, the crashes happen the most when viewing heavy flash (be it fullscreen video, flash game, a few big flash ads on websites, etc.). It specifically happens when changing sites (visible crash) or when closing the browser (invisible crash, but FF does not free up the memory)

While i have a "killall firefox-bin" launcher icon on my desktop, sometimes my system becomes so unresponsive because it stays in memory and i have to try to reboot or force a system shutdown.

Anyway this can be easily fixed (when implemented) if the process is killed after a crash, freeing up the memory and making the system usable again.

sadly i had to install the windows version of Firefox + flash in Wine to avoid the crashing.... so why do we have a buggy linux version that won't even detect the crash and free up the mem??

Reading through a bunch of the ideas presented here it is obvious that if Ubuntu implemented a fraction of them the OS would become a bit hefty.

My suggestion is instead of trying to replace everything with a GUI that instead we provide documentation on using the terminal. The users need to be educated on how to use the command line. It's very powerful and fast.

Provide a database of useful commands and make the information in the database organized, searchable, and well documented.

For example:
Making an ISO. dd if=/dev/cdrom of=file.iso bs=1024
Searching for files. find / -name "*searchCriteria*"
how to show processes and kill 'em. ps -u user ... Kill -9 #####


Perhaps others here can comment with their most useful command lines and we can create a package on our own instead of armchair quarterbacking the ubuntu team?

Ubuntu should adopt standardized usage of IEC binary prefixes (MiB, KiB, etc.) and SI decimal prefixes (MB, kB, etc.) throughout the most visible parts of the operating system.

When referring to sizes based on powers of two, software in Ubuntu should use IEC binary prefixes: KiB for 2^10 bytes, MiB for 2^20 bytes, GiB for 2^30 bytes, and so forth.

When referring to sizes based on powers of ten, software in Ubuntu should use SI decimal prefixes: kB for 10^3 bytes, MB for 10^6 bytes, GB for 10^9 bytes, and so forth.

Like most of us, I grew up writing "MB" and saying "megabyte" when I meant 2^20 bytes, and I expect I'll continue to use SI prefixes in conversation. In those days, the rate of error was minimal -- around 2.5% for kB vs KiB, and around 5% for MB vs MiB. As storage capacity continues to grow, and users deal with larger files, the error rate increases -- around 7% for GB vs GiB and a hefty 10% in the TB/TiB range.

Standardizing Ubuntu's description of data sizes using the IEC and SI prefixes will help to avoid ambiguity, and will also help to prevent the increasingly large errors that result from conflating the two prefix systems.

As a user I want to be able to listen to audio or watch videos with the least amount of setup. I would like to have a single interface (Codec Manager) that lists all of the most common audio and video formats and shows me if I am missing the necessary codec for playback.

Use Case: Enable MP3 playback.
Precondition: MP3s are not currently playable.
1. User logs into the system.
2. User opens the Codec Manager.
3. System displays a list of common audio/video formats.
4. User selects MP3s.
5. System displays some info about MP3s.
6. System displays a list of available codecs.
7. User selects a codec and clicks Apply.
8. System downloads and installs the selected codec.
9. System informs the user when completed.

Other possible features:
- Display a list of audio/video types that are missing codecs.
- An auto-setup function, that grabs the recommended codec for all formats.

Audio and Video formats that should be supported:

Audio:
- MP3
- OGG
- AAC
- FLAC
- Real Audio

Video:
- MP4

[....]

Hi!

I'm a big fan of Images like .iso.
But it is not very easy to mount this Images.
I think there must be a Tool in Nautilus and Dolphin wich alows mounting Images with a double Click. (This feature exists int MacOS). Or with a right click on the file and then there must be a poit "Mount Image". I thick that would be a very use full Tool for every one.
A good example for this is CDemu.

I know there are some ohter good programs, but I think that would be the easyest way and very confortible.

Nanotron

As I understand it, many users have multiple systems on which they run Ubuntu. Due to the nature of Ubuntu/Linux and the way in which it is easily customisable, I think it would be a good idea to create a GUI application to easily remaster Ubuntu with user specific customisations.

An easy to use application designed to achieve this would save users, like myself, from having to customise each installation individually. The customisations could be made once, burned to disc and then installed on any number of machines. This would save users a huge amount of time and could also benefit organisations wanting to install their own customised version of Ubuntu.

Note: scripts [such as remastersys] already exist and they will help to achieve this; however, they can be quite buggy and require the user to have a good understanding of the scripting language and the inner working of Ubuntu. I wouldn't consider them very user friendly.

I would like to setup a local ubuntu mirror to manage updates that are rolled out to all desktops in my company ( 100% ubuntu on the desktop )

I dont want to have to spend time researching how to do an update box, and ideally this could be an option in the Ubuntu Server Setups... ( a new class of server... such as LAMP, Database, etc etc )

this could also be accomplished by a meta package that setups apache, and all the config as needed, asks what you want your upstream mirror to be ( Id choose the one thats my ISP provides un-metered access to ).

then to make it even better, id like the ability to review updates and maybe batch them or something, to save users getting updates every day.

Let's say you have an application(non-gui) or a command that you want to run at boot (before a user logs in). There should be an easy way to make this happen. For non-blocking applications(daemons), it would just fire and forget. If it is a blocking application (one that holds the terminal until it terminates), it wraps it into a daemon.

Example: I have a virtual machine (in VirtualBox) that runs a Windows-only server application. I access this VM when I need to through RDP (rdesktop), but I want to run this VM when my machine boots.

Another example: Alice just installed a service that does not come with an init script, and must run this service when the machine boots. She would really like an easy way to start this service without having to write her own init script.

Another example: Bob has a bash script that continually checks for updates for something and downloads new updates. He's not always logged in, or someone else is using the machine. But he wants the newest version to be there when he's ready for it.