Contributor florus

Ubuntu currently doesn't upgrade the kernel, it just keeps adding newer and newer kernels to the system.

Currently, the list of kernels installed on a Ubuntu system grows over time. This takes up additional disk space and adds clutter to the boot loader.

Ideally, older kernels should be removed automatically.

Maybe leave current and current-1, but not _all_ of them...

There is a logic for this in my opinion:

1 - Improve usability, stability and speed for Firefox users in Ubuntu. Beta 5 has some big issues.

2 - This also would help the Mozilla dev team because there would be thousand of users using RC1 instead of Beta5.

3 - The "Beta" can confuse some users.


So, what do you think?

* A new icon set which matches more closely the icon style of other mozilla applications
* Category colors are now shown next to an event box, giving users a much better overview of their differently categorized events
* Events with alarms now have a visual indicator showing an alarm bell
* A totally overhauled alarm dialog
* Sunbird now recognizes the timezone definitions in .ics files created by other applications. This fixes the longstanding issue of Sunbird miscalculating the date or time of events contained in those files
* The timezone guessing has been significantly improved
* Sunbird now contains experimental support for viewing remote calendars offline. This feature has known bugs and is included for testing purposes only
* Sunbird contains several performance fixes, which should improve working with larger calendar files
* You can now define for each of your calendars, whether you want to be notified of alarms for events in these calendars or not
* A full list of changes that have gone into this release can be found on The Rumbling Edge website

I found it very frustrating when I first got into Ubuntu, and was looking around at the Packages to install, that I had to have the installation CD in my computer. Especially since it was a laptop and I didn't have my CD Drive in.

I eventually found out how to remove it as a repository source.

It should not be set as default, or perhaps, if it isn't there, Synaptic should go and look on the internet. Which it doesn't.

The "About Me" utility under System->Preferences is a nifty way to store information like your name, phone number, etc.

Do many people use it? I think not. Why? Because you have NO idea which applications read this information and what they do with it.

Either allow me to control which applications read this information so I can restrict access on a field level or get rid of the thing entirely. For example, I do not want Pigin/IRC channels to have access to my home phone number, etc.

As it is, it has that creepy, privacy-invading feel of Windows that made me move to Ubuntu in the first place. Time to fix it or lose it.

This is concerning the graphical and the text based installer.

It`s a bad habit introduces by microsoft. Do not ask questions in the middle of the installation after you did already started to copy things.

(1) The user starts the installation.
(2) He is asked if he wants to install.
(3) Make as many hardware tests as you need.
(4) Now ask all needed questions.
(5) Install Ubuntu in one run. Tell the user he can no go away for perhaps X minutes.

Otherwise it`s annoying. Input answer, wait a bit, input answer, wait again over and over again. You can improve this!

When I logged into Ubuntu 8.04 Beta, my CPU was pegged. Using top, I found it from a process related to Evolution. I think evolution-data-server-2.22.

This is annoying, because I never use Evolution. And with the advent gmail, yahoo mail, etc. I suspect fewer people each day use non-browser mail clients.

Similarly, when Beagle indexing was enabled by default, we once again had a case of imposing a nasty, unexplained CPU burden on users who didn't even want to use the service. Same thing for 'updatedb' for mlocate.

Now, to make things worse: in order to prevent evolution-data-server from hogging my CPU, I tried to uninstall it. But doing so would have uninstalled, among other things, ubuntu-desktop. If I had uninstalled ubuntu-desktop, then I wouldn't automatically receive other packages were later added it. So that wasn't a good option either.

I propose:
1. Do NOT include these annoying packages in the base installation.

2. Having a post-install (for the person doing the install) wizard. Here, prompt the users about installing sometimes-desired but sometimes-actively-undesired packages such as the ones mentioned above.

3. Haveing a post-first-login wizard, run the first time each account is logged into. Have it ask users about whether or not they want Beagle's indexing to be enabled, evoluation-data-server to be enabled, etc. This will both make them aware of these services, and let them avoid the unexplained CPU peggings.

Basically the way this would work would be you could preorder a CD of an unreleased version of ubuntu(in this case, 8.04)
on the ubuntu website. so once it was released, and they got some CD's in stock, they would ship it to you.

Maybe this would work for "request a free CD" too.

When I was installing ubuntu on my system and wanted to dual boot, I had a very tough time doing so because I did not know what ntfs, ext3, etc. meant so I spent more time than necessary to get it all started. I propose to have a feature on LiveCD, during installation process that will prepare your hard drive for dual boot. When you load it up it should ask how much space you want to use to implement in your partition and do everything else automatically and then continue with the installation.

Probably this is going to be controversial but...

The majority of people that are into open source/free software probably don't like very much some of the laws the USA got, DMCA, software patents, lots of power to DRM and not so much power to the users... Microsoft threatening Linux with lawsuits! a "Sue them all!!!" policy that threatens everyone...
Lots of countries in the world have more freedom in the aspect of the "digital things"... and it kinda sucks that every ubuntu user in the world gets a system that (in it's default configuration, of course) can't even play a .mp3 file! not because of technical limitations, but because of laws made by the powerfull people of one or few countries, lobbied by the rich guys and companys...

Why not just relocate ubuntu main servers to a more free country? I don't know were they are now, but Sweden, for example, looks good for this kind of things... so a more “complete package” of ubuntu could be offered (I'm talking about software like libdvdcss, etc... software that is free software but is not included only because the fear of lawsuits) I'm not saying: “Lets be the Pirates of Sealand and live in anarchy!”, but most of us agree that the current laws in USA are a bit...... well... I leave it to you to think about it...

[EDIT] This is not about including proprietary software, it is about including FREE software, but that in the current situation is ILLEGAL (link to PDF with DRM) to use in the USA (or at least "risky" or "in a grey area" of legislation).

(This is not getting into stuff like "My country is better than yours!"... they All have good things and bad things... it is just my humble opinion...)
Peace.

Many times a brainstorm idea is marked as "Done" but I can't figure out where/how the idea was implemented. It would be extremely helpful if there was an explanation that addressed how the idea was implemented at the top of the page. For example.

"The idea has been implemented in the upcoming release of Ubuntu 8.10 in April. To use the new feature, click on System->Administration->New Feature."

Fonts in OpenOffice are horrendously rendered and look thin and 'scratchy' (Times New Roman in Writer being a good example) and additionally there is no sub-pixel anti-aliasing even when the rest of my desktop is using it.

Some horizontal strokes such as on the small letter 'p' are actually invisible - there appears to be not enough weight in them and makes the document look like it has been photocopied too many times.

Currently this is not an application I would like to spend much of my day using (and thankfully I don't have to) - but if Ubuntu is being touted as suitable in an office environment, this could be a serious problem.

I am pushing for Ubuntu to be used in our company but this sort of thing does not help my case.

OpenOffice.org is quite sluggish with its default settings. Every time I install Ubuntu, one of the first things I do is change the OpenOffice.org settings.

I usually change the settings as follows:
MEMORY - 30 steps, 128MB, 20 objects, 20MB per object
JAVA - Do not use Java
VIEW - Open GL, optimized output, dithering, refresh during interaction and hardware acceleration all ticked.


Without the View settings changed, running old powerpoint presentations in slideshow mode literally brings a dual core processor to a halt.


I'm not sure that the default settings should be exactly as described above because I'm not sure what ramifications that might have for other computers, but it seems to be that there is a lot of room for improvement in performance.

Create a Welcome Center for New Users of Ubuntu explaining the ethos of each of the website sections. Similar to a Grand Tour, this would include the ins and outs of finding the information new users need, such as a non-technical descriptions of the resources available.

Another section could cover switching from other products (i.e. Office to OpenOffice.org, Google Desktop Search to Beagle/Tracker, IE to Firefox). Speed keys and Keyboard shortcuts could be another category.

This would be a strong marketing tool for average computer users and rally some excitement about making the switch. As it developed, Ubuntu would, in effect, be creating a "Power User" community that was capable of helping others in their offices or families take the plunge.

I would love to contribute my time to this kind of promotion. Ubuntu has the ability to light a lot of fires and gain considerable market share through demonstrating a warm welcome for people that are interested.

Fostering a power user community that can support "newbie" questions would, in my opinion, greatly extend those efforts.

Last year Dell began offering Ubuntu preinstalled on a few of their laptops. Dell seems to really be embracing its users lately, and Ubuntu's Brainstorm is a derivative of Dell's IdeaStorm.

I'd like to see a more complete line of Dell laptop and desktops supported in Ubuntu more fully. I personally use a Dell Inspiron 9300, and while most hardware works out of the box, there a few quirks. LED Bluetooth and WiFi, and strange ALSA mixing come to mind.

Perhaps Canonical and Dell can come to some sort of agreement in regards to laptop compatibility for those laptops still being used today (Mine was bought in July of 2005 and is still a great laptop).

With that said, IBM and Sony if I recall correctly have kernel modules for handling ACPI and BIOS quirks in their own way. There is currently no such easily accessible kernel module for Dell laptops, or HP laptops.

Most new computers bought today are laptops, so being able to fully support the hardware is greatly important. It might also be easier to implement some of the power-saving features described in other brainstorm ideas once the full capabilities of the hardware have been exposed to the operating system.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if after installing meta-packages like gnome-games, ubuntu-desktop etc. the package manager would allow you to un-install any of the files inside so-long as it isnt a dependancy...

e.g. You could remove Chess and Soduku without the whole Gnome-Games being removed... and... Gedit and Evolution without the whole of Ubuntu-Desktop being taken away...

This would make it a lot easier to save space and leave packages you want on your computer that will still be updated even if the meta-package is removed...

Enough with the OSX style swirls. From now on lets have a striking image FOR EVERY RELEASE. The current 8.04 wallpaper is just so much more stylish and rememberable than generic swirls.

My suggestion would be to make each wallpaper tie in with the animal name. Like there were some pretty cool Gibson graphics being used on tshirts and the like but why couldn't they have been used as part of the wallpaper? They would have been just as striking as the new Heron one.

I think there is perhaps a side benefit to using the animal name as every graphical designer gets 8 months heads up on the next name and hence the next theme of the graphic, so there should be no reason why come release time you wont have a bunch of cool graphics to choose from.

Whenever users plan to buy new hardware for their ubuntu machines, they first have to search the web to find informations about kernel/driver support or incompatibility issues.

It would be really helpful if a sticker on the outside of the box of a scanner/printer/usb-dvb-tuner/mp3(ogg)-player/digicam/... simply said "works with ubuntu" or "designed for GNU/Linux" to guarantee that the product runs "out of the box" with Ubuntu or other Linux distributions.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/darkomen/155060941/
http://forum.ubuntuusers.de/topic/88743/next/

Edit (2008-03-04): This project seems to be on the road already: http://www.ubuntu.com/partners/hardwareprogramme

Whilst it's possible to use the "migration" tool in Ubiquity (the live installer for ubuntu) during the installation to migrate settings over, there seems to be no way to do this _after_ the system has been installed.

It should be possible to pick the migration functionality out of Ubiquity and make it a standalone application which a user could run over and over (as necessary) to migrate the current setup on their Windows partition into their Ubuntu partition.

A further useful feature would be a "delete windows" option which makes it easier for people to fully migrate from Windows. It should find the Windows partitions and (after confirmation/checking) delete them, reformat them and add them to Ubuntus storage. Either via LVM, or by massaging the partitions, or even adding the space under some mount point.

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

[....]