Contributor cyberwiz

It would be great to have a GUI for the locate command. THis is a very powerful tool and I think it is essential to have a search function which indexes only file names and attributes. I never need to use a desktop search engine to find content but I'm always using locate. The important thing is to be able to easily pipe results to a filemanager so I can manipulate files (copy,cut,paste,rename etc). The locate plugin in krusader does this, but it would be great to have this functionality native to Ubuntu. The one application I have missed since moving from xp is Locate32, which revolutionized my computer use. As the author of locate32 based his program on locate for unix I think we should have a similar front-end for Ubuntu.

Everyone is familiar with Open Office’s office suite or Firefox/Mozzilla’s internet suite of Firefox and Thunderbird. Both suites have found homes in Linux and are a staple in many Linux distros.(IMHO) These two application suites have made Linux a viable OS in desktop computing. Yes, I do know other alternatives to OOO and FF are available and, competition is a good thing.

The time has now come for a multi-media Application Suite for the OSS community. Lets face it, Linux lacks many of the creative and multi-media tools that it needs to be a real desktop OS. Many new users to Ubuntu/ Linux just need a simple way to edit video, audio and pics. I know that many apps already exist for these needs but, most of these apps fall short and do not integrate with one another(IMHO).

Is there a really solid OSS video editor for the home video enthusiast? This is what I see with many OSS video editors: Cinelerra is overkill and it lacks the ability to capture DV video. Kino and Diva are just to basic. Pitivi just combines clips, Kdenlive is still very buggy (in beta) also, getting firewire to work is also a real pain for video editing applications too.

A simple to use video editor is much needed in the home user Ubuntu/ Linux desktop. While were talking about video Apps how about integrating a video editor with a separate DVD Video creation app? Is this starting to sound like iMovie and iDVD?

Image editing in Linux needs work too, Gimp is OK for simple editing but should combine a photo manager and needs some work with some of the core tools and its UI to make it easer for the home user. Once more, the Image app should be able to work with the video editing and DVD creation software.

If these apps were created and worked well, a natural side effect could be a push in the use of free or open source formats for media such as ogg. Having a multimedia application suite for creation that pushes open media formats such as OGG would be huge!

So the BIG question is how do you make money off developing this Application suite? Easy, all of these apps create multimedia files that either have hard copy equivalents or can be uploaded to sharing sites like youtube or flicker.

[....]

When i change some hardware pieces i need to configure them manually, ubuntu should recognize there has been a hardware change and configure it.

Replace initscripts with upstart events. Our boot sequence is currently slow, full of race conditions and poor interactions, especially with competition between the series of tasks run by sysv-rc, udev and sometimes just with the kernel. We developed upstart so that we could have a truly event driven boot sequence that would be fast, reliable and flexible; we should take advantage of it.

A separate partition for /home has been proposed for a long time in the forums. It implies some risks, though, so based on disk size Ubiquity should estimate the amount of space that should be left for / or whether a separate partition should be made at all. Then...

-The first time an user installs Ubuntu, he is given the option to set a separate /home. This option is selected by default, with a size for each partition based on a sane guess:

http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/7958/firstinstallaro2.png

-Of course, he can just choose not to set a separate /home. This option will be selected by default if the results of the system test suggest that's the best thing to do.

http://img186.imageshack.us/img186/6498/firstinstallbfs6.png

-Manual install is also possible. Selecting it greys out everything related to separate /home, since it's implied that the user doesn't want to be guided.

http://img177.imageshack.us/img177/7976/firstinstallcvc2.png

-If the user set a separate /home, the next time he installs Ubuntu a new option appears and is selected by default, prompting to use the existing /home partition. All other options are still available, though.

http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/9034/secondinstalliq1.png

[....]

I've recently spent some time trying to make various games work under Linux, and very often tweaks to the WINE settings is required, overrides must be set and so on. This can be technically solved through multiple WINE directories since games don't care about being in their "own" Windows, but I've found the process very user-unfriendly.

What I would like a form of "winestaller" script so that you insert the CD, and instead of launching the CD you launch the script (downloaded) that'll create a new wine environment, download the required files and set the appropriate parameters and laucnh the setup to that environment. It should take http and torrent sources and use cabextract for getting directx files, preferably cached since some like directx and msvcrt are needed by many games.

Issues:
Security - the script could be malicious
Legal - the scripts could contain links to EULA/copyright-breaking files or cracks

I'm not sure appdb or such would allow these, but it could for example be used for a third-party repository like medibuntu.

What about creating a bundle of Ubuntu LTS and a specific hardware configuration which is known to work perfect and stable with Ubuntu. Like Apple does with MacOSX and Mac Mini, iMac, etc. hardware, but non-proprietary.

(Should be marked as implemented)

Currently,in the Hardy Heron Beta the Pidgin version is 2.3. A new version has been released,2.4.1,wich solves many problem,for example the file transfer send/recieve problem on the yahoo protocol.

I suggest upgrading pidgin to the latest version,because there are many improvements ;-)

There should be a single, low cpu app that displays all the notifications for all programs in a corner of the screen (bottom right)

It should say:

[App Title]
-----------
[Notification]

It is much better than popups and notification Icons.

Eyecandy would also be nice here - fade effect, etc.

I think Canonical should have to support and improve 3D projects, in order to jeopardy the Micro$oft DirectX' API.

It's interesting for all 3D games, or other apps.

I hope 3D developpers will be interested, and will migrate to GNU/Linux.

In Mac OS X when you try to copy/move a file in a protected folder appears a pop-up that asks you to insert admin password.

In Ubuntu the same thing become very difficult, especilly copying multiple files: you have to access to the terminal and write a command. This could be really stressing for a new user.

Could you implement the same function seen on Mac?

When installing the server version we can select encrypted partition but when installing desktop we dont have this choice. Since Desktop version are more subject to be installed on Laptop I dont understand why this feature is not availlable.

If a users system has hardware that doesn't have a driver installed by ubuntu the system should tell the user, and suggest where to to get the driver.

For example:
This laptops wifi card isn't currently supported by ubuntu by default. You can make it work by using...

This notification should not be annoying and should be cancellable.

When you play 'corrupted' videos in vlc, it just skips the frames it can't read. Totem on the other hand stops entirely and throws an errormessage at you. This is annoying. I'd like to see this kind of immunity in totem...

I have GRUB as bootloader and attached an eSATA disk. Upon the next reboot GRUB no longer worked right. Unplugging the eSATA disk made GRUB come back to life.
I assume the same would happen with a USB drive? GRUB and the sorts detected the partition alright, it just didn't get that I still wanted to boot from the same partition as before.
Any chance to make GRUB to be smarter?

There are screen savers that are very similar (there about 3 or 4 screen savers with falling icons as an example). Merge together screen savers that only have visual differences (example: falling feet and falling circle of friends) but have a way to customize the screen saver to the users preference (example: I want falling pictures of my cat or Gnome feet or the Circle of Friends).

There should be no information about the monitor in any configuration like xorg.conf. All informations should be detected automatic. Just Plug and Play!

There should be ONE standard for Desktop Themes. One Standard, which specific SVG-Graphics and Colors. Work with Freedesktop to do this. Store the themes in XDG_THEMES_DIR and create an standard to set the used theme and the additional color-Informations. So any Toolkit (GTK+, QT, libxul,...) could use this theme. It is really possible. We want unified desktop experience!

Ubiquity should detect the hardware automatically and ask me to install for example nvidia driver. I do not want to install this driver after reboot and then reboot again.

Brainstorm needs a category for ideas that specifically pertain to Ubuntu when run in LiveCD mode.