Contributor gmatht

It's probably been mentioned before and in many ways on Brainstorm but there should be a way to fix GRUB, Xorg and other common boot problems without booting into X on the LiveCD.

I've heard there were already options like this in the alternate installation CD so it shouldn't be too hard to move those scripts to Casper.

Just create a 'Fix a Current Ubuntu Installation' link on the menu and let that lead to a list of options.

The ability to assign different priorities to different processes is great, but because of the hassle of micromanaging processes and keeping the System Monitor or a terminal open just for renice-ing processes, it's currently not very practical to use it much.

Perhaps, the system could use clues from the Window Manager to handle this automatically?

When you are running multiple applications in a GUI, such as running Update Manager in the background while browsing the web in Firefox, the application in front of the user should not become unresponsive to user input. Even if you are doing something intensive in the background which you want to complete quickly, giving priority to the web browser would only minimally slow down the background process.

It's always possible to change the priority/renice processes as appropriate, but I think it would be OK if the system assumed that certain processes should have higher or lower priorities based on the position of the window in the GUI. Maximized windows should be given the highest priority, a window in the foreground should have a higher priority than a window in the background, and minimized windows should be given a lower priority, automatically. Also, a way to override this feature from the File menu would be practical.

From a user's prospective, this would cause their computer to feel slow less often, enhancing the user experience in general.

A window should not steal away focus until the mouse button is released after clicking on it.

Advantages of such a behaviour:
Imagine a situation when you drag and drop your videos to say, VLC. You have a maximized nautilus window at back and a smaller vlc window on it's front. When you click on the video to drag it and drop it, nautilus immediately steals the focus from vlc and vlc hides behind the maximized nautilus window. So you have to drag the icon the whole way to the task bar, hover over the vlc entry for a second while vlc gains back focus and comes forward over the nautilus window, and then drop it on the player window.

Suppose if a window is designed *not* to steal focus on mere clicking but only after the mouse button is released, the above mentioned situation could be easily handled :-
- If a user wishes to drag, so he might not release the mouse at all when he clicks on the nautilus window. So the focus will remain on vlc and the user could easily drop it on the player.
- If the user actually wants to switch the focus to nautilus from vlc, he would prefer *clicking* on the nautilus window to bring it to the front, and hence would be releasing the mouse button while doing so. That would naturally, bring nautilus to front giving it focus.


*** Not marking this to be related to nautilus as the scenario is same for dolphin also.

When Totem comes across a file that breaks, instead of failing on that file, it should skip to the next one, when a playlist is involved. The message should still be displayed to notify the user, but it shouldn't interrupt playback unless some kind of looping failure is occurring.

Use case: Adam has 32-bit Ubuntu on 64-bit computer. He wants to have 64-bit system but doesn't want to lose all his settings and installed applications.

Remedy: allow to upgrade 32-bit Ubuntu to 64-bit version by Internet or special Upgrade CD (alternate CD?). Doesn't have to be ideal (just preserve home folder/partition and the list of installed applications, maybe also some setting files - as during normal upgrade).

As I'm downloading a bunch of intrepid beta packages, I'm struck by something:

While doing so, I can't run short apt jobs--install a package here, purge one there--without first C-c'ing the bulk transfer, doing the thing, and restarting the bulk transfer.

All package managers should agree on a new and (much) more fine-grained locking convention, such that when one is doing a bulk transfer, one can also do small jobs [installation, deletion, ...] at the same time.

Icing on this cake would be for the difference process to
talk together and have them say "My download is this big and this old" to prioritize the interactive ones over the bulk ones. You know, be smart about allocating bandwidth and locks. While downloading, it should also interact a bit with the user, say by saying "I see you also have another download running; this is top priority right now, want to change that?"

The super-awesomeness version would look at what parameters make the user prioritize something lower or higher and learn from the user.

This is aimed at all package managers; apt-get, aptitude, synaptic, add/remove, update-manager (I'm assuming changes need to be made at that level; am I right?)

[Sorry for misspell in the title - it should be keep not keed]


For quite long time I was fighting with ssh server. Finally I figured out the eth0 hadn't been set via /etc/network/interfaces (I wonder how my network was set if not in that file - for more see bug 241796 ;/). I'm not sure if was wrong from a very beginning or something happened after installation.

Keeping the /etc/ files in some 'CVS' probably would not help me resolve the issue but for sure help me trace what cause such strange network setting. As a person working in Support I would be really glad to have tool saying that some screw up file that time.

Many of support situation can be describe by following conversation:

Support - Have you changed anything in your system?
Customer - No
Support - Are you sure?
Customer - Yes of course.
Support - by file X looks strange
Customer - Oh yes, I changed my network card. Is it important?

Seeing log with etc changes will be great in such situation.

Interesting links:
inotify - 'cron' like tool working based on changes in filesystem
http://inotify.aiken.cz/?section=incron&page=about&lang=en

in firefox 3 when you do a print preview it will show you all frames put together. you should be able to select what frame you want via a drop down box.

this is a very handy feature because at this point in time a number of web sites i want to print from i have to create a pdf file first and downscale the print size to say 50% and play with the values a few times till it looks right. once it is correct then i can print it to my printer for a hard copy.

very much a time saver if this feature could be implemented

thanks

I think it would be a good idea to print advertisment of official partners on the ubuntu cd.Anyway the cd goes to all parts of the world.So this can be a hot place to put advertisements for companies ...

But strictly no advertisement should be put in the cd(cd contents).This can easily cover the cost of cds... and can also let canonical make and ship more cds.

This is an attempt to submit brainstorm 10644 as a workable idea, that will actually achieve the goals elie stated.

Modify the install process to use one of three privileged accounts, as follows:

1. Any package which needs to install something suid, or needs to touch /etc, /bin, /lib, or /var (excluding, of course, the actual package files) still requires root to install. (Simple heuristics: If it's not all going in /usr, it touches root so requires root. Only root can su without a password, so suid requires root.)

2. Any other package can either be installed using the 'bin' user or using the 'local' user. If it's installed using the 'bin' user, it is put into /usr, the way most packages are installed today.

3. If it's installed using the 'local' user, it's installed into /usr/local. (The only change from the current paths is that 'local' is inserted right after /usr; the structure otherwise is retained.) Any package installed using the 'local' user tracks which user installed it. Only that user or someone with either 'bin' or 'root' access can uninstall it.

With this setup, one could then use sudo(1) or a similar program to manage who can install programs, and at what level. Note that dpkg would need to some modifications. One possibility could be have it store the package database information with acls to allow both 'bin' and 'local' update it. (This could be simplified slightly by having 'bin' own the database.)

There would need to be some key constraints:

A. Only root could install files without entering a password to do so.

B. The 'bin' and 'local' users would need a shell that prevents general command execution. I'd recommend a custom shell which invoked aptitude, synaptic, or another package manager depending on environment and what is installed.


[....]

I always forget which episode I am up to in a tv series.

It would be nice to have a 'watched' emblem for nautilus to drag onto the file after watching.

Spectacles is probably most appropriate icon, which could also be applied to documents etc.

Has anyone else noticed that when you run an app from a launcher (gnome-panel menu, nautilus desktop). If the app is bugged or for example, you don't have XGL and the app is 3d. Nothing will happen, the user will wonder what's going on?

What's interesting is that most apps will return 0 on 'successful' exit yet they will return something else if they segfault, or exit with an error. Not only that, but some *n*x* apps might even write error messages to stderr, with a good error message.

The suggestion is, wouldn't it be wonder if when ubuntu's GUI's launchers could just detect if the exit code was a bad one? signal Segmentation fault is a good one, for example,

"/bin/lolipop/"
"The program has encountered an issue and needed to be closed"
"[Details>>]"

Press details and a text box appears with the contents of stderr (if there are contents).

Hello everybody!

At the moment the Hardware Testing tool for Ubuntu asks for the Email address of your Launchpad account on the last page and will not let you send the report if you leave the field empty.

Obvious problem: A new Ubuntu user might have never heard of Launchpad and most likely does not have an account for it! Moreover the hardware testing tool does not give any information what that "Launchpad" should be ...
We do NOT want new users to get confused, right? Especially not if they have hardware problems ...

Please improve this by
- giving an "I don't have a Launchpad account" option OR
- letting the user to create one (easily!) OR
- telling the user that he can use his normal Email address if he does not have a Launchpad account
(Or maybe a combination of them ;P)

This is just a small change, but anyway, I believe that it is important that we do not confuse people that are willing to switch to Linux / Ubuntu ...

Thank you for reading and I hope that you agree with me ... :-)

F-Spot is a relatively clumsy photo-manager. One major issue is the fact that it completely ignores my organization of photos into folders and imposes its own schemes and tries to make a duplicate copy of all photos to "import" it into the F-spot collection. Why can't the organizer respect the organization that the user already has and build up on that?

gThumb is so much better in this aspect. Moreover, you can also choose to work with your collection in Nautilus if you feel like, without having to open the photo manager every time you need to touch your photos.

The only thing I still find superior in windows is the MikTeX distribution. There is a package manager that lists all the packages and installs them when necessary. You can also update your packages automatically. TeXlive doesn't have these features: you have to install/update every package manually.

Can a similar package manager be implemented for Ubuntu?

take any application in Ubuntu and shrink the size of it from full screen to say the size of a cigarette pack for argument sake.

notice how on neither the left or the right side of the window you just created there is no scroll bar to move the application around inside the window you just created.

nor is there a scroll bar at the top or bottom to move the application round to left or right in side the window you just created.

in other words if you want to have 2 or 3 or 4 apps running inside the same screen you can only work with one at a time usually as you have to maximize the screen.

this is a major setback :-((

Add automated page fire creation (r-click) option when a usb flash drive is mounted. This would be great for laptops (and desktops) low on physical memory (512MB or less) as usb flash seek time is only 2ms which makes it much faster than a traditional page file/swap partition. I have implemented this myself on my eeepc and it defiantly gives you a performance boost but its quite messy having to create "swapon" scripts and whatnot. This is already implemented in vista in the form of readyboost (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyBoost)

The idea is simple implementation:
when a user is running say image viewer like eog it should be integrated into Gimp(eg:photo editor tool) which is related to photos,when a user desires to edit the image he wont have to open from menus rather in context menu open for editing in gimp.
Integration between applications is need to make easy-to-use desktop. Functions in all programs should be integrated so fine that user will not even know if is running another program. Some examples: in addressbook I will see who is online and even more I will see that user who sent me mail is online; when I try to search something it will be done seamless with another application (e.g. Beagle) with same UI from all applications; when reading document in web browser it should be easy for user to start editing it with his/her favorite application (gedit, leafpad, scream, bluefish)...
When user see information that is possible to change, it should be possible to change it. Even if changing it is out of the scope of that application. At least there should be option (icon/button/link/context menu...) to invoke program that has ability to change it. Application should also give option to change properties that can change only administrator. In that case it should ask for administrator's password and property could be marked with keys or lock icon. Clicking on that icon will ask for password and unlocks property.
Every desktop tries for integration but all needs to do much more.

There is known methods for HDD upgade using rsync and so on...
All of them have some hard part, for example making system bootable again, managing UUID of HDDs...
it will be innovative if Ubuntu have such GUI tool for easy
HDD upgrade.

gnome-system-monitor provides a cleaner interface than Windows "Task Manager", and provides many useful features including list of processes running, memory and network usage, etc.

This functionality should be more accessible by key binding it by default to CTRL-ALT-DELETE as Windows does--as this is more familiar to users coming from Windows. The current key binding for CTRL-ALT-DELETE brings up the shutdown/logout options, which is already accessible as a desktop button, which is redundant for a relatively less used function.

gnome-system-monitor is an idle interface for monitoring the system and killing processes without using the terminal and provides an interface for doing this that most are already familiar with. Changing it's key binding would make it's functionality much more accessible.