Contributor gmatht

Hardy has been released with Firefox 3, but many popular extensions are not yet compatible with Firefox 3. As the wide availability of extensions is a major selling point for Firefox, this is a significant regression from Gutsy. Providing Firefox 3 compatible versions of popular extensions would make the transition to Hardy much more pleasant.

For some reason [1] below does not mention the problem of toolbar addon buttons going missing in Firefox 3. In any case a work around for this is to instruct the user to manually add the button by right-clicking the toolbar and selecting Customize.

[1] http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Updating_extensions_for_Firefox_3
[2] http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Building_an_Extension

In Firefox, you can middle click on the icon in the address bar to paste a URL into the address bar. This is very useful as it is difficult to erase text without selecting it.

It would be nice if we could likewise middle click the icon on the search bar to paste search terms into the search bar.

As the default boot splash gives no useful information, we may as well allow the user to (optionally) replace the boot splash with something more interesting than a progress bar. I suggest holding a 128k demo competition [1] for things we could replace the boot splash with. Although 128k is tiny compared to Hardy's 7MB initrd, it gives a lot of flexibility. Things that could easily fit in 128k include a game of Pacman, a calendar/organizer, an entire Mac Classic like OS [2] ... or theoretically* even a Doom 3 like game [3].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger
* although kkrieger requires under 100K of storage it takes too long to start to be useful as a boot splash.

If a user is added to a group, they do not have access to the rights of that group until they login again. This is typically achieved by asking the user to logout. See e.g.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus-share/+bug/212098

Logging out of a session is almost as much hassle as rebooting, it saves a bit of time but e.g. downloads will still be interrupted unless you are running them on a linuxterm.

I suggest that we add a command "sume" that is equivalent to "su `whoami` -c" but does not require the user to re-enter their password. Then we can change applications, such as virtualbox and nautilus-share that require rights to particular groups, so that their wrappers run them via sume. This will mean that these applications will "just work" without the user being interrupted in anyway.

In Ubuntu if you enter a command that has not yet be installed, you get a message like the following:

"The program 'vm' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install mgetty-voice"

I suggest that if a user tries e..g "man fprintf" they should get a message saying:

"The manpage for 'fprintf' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install manpages-dev"

FYI, you can get a list of packages that provide manpages with "apt-cache search manpages".

Also, if a program halts due to a missing Perl module, it would be nice if a dialog window appeared informing the user they can install the required Perl module. The dialog window could perhaps also provide a option to download the module.

When we click on the Adept icon in the KDE panel, the second copy of Adept prints an error and refuses to start.

We could put wrappers around such programs so that when we select them they bring the existing process to the foreground rather than try to create a new one (and fail). This can be done fairly simply with wmctrl using a command like:
wmctrl -R "Adept" || adept.

Canonical provide Rsync servers so that users can save bandwidth by downloading only changes from one iso to another. I suggest that Zsync files be added (along with the exists torrent Jiddo etc. files) so that the user can use Zsync to download changes instead.

Rsync requires special server software and increases the load on the server. The has caused the Rsync servers to become overloaded and unusable [1]. In Zsync all the processing is done of the client side, and Zsync requires only a normal http server. Additionally Zsync appears to use less bandwidth than Rsync [2].

Since zsync files can be hosted on normal http servers, Canonical could depreciate use of the Rsync servers. In any case adding zsync would probably make the Rsync servers more reliable by reducing the load on them.

[1] http://www.mail-archive.com/ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com/msg03448.html
[2] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/sounder/2008-March/011108.html