Contributor guyminuslife

Folding@Home is a distributed computing (DC) project designed to perform computationally intensive simulations of protein folding and other molecular dynamics (MD).

It allows people to use spare CPU cycles to contribute processing power for protein folding, so that scientists can understand cancer and other deceases.

When you press ctrl alt f1 ect you get a terminal indepenant of X and is wonderfull if you know what your doing, but say my mum accadentally presses ctrl alt f1. Not knowing really what she is doing or the cat lands on the keyboard and puts it into a terminal. She would think the computer is broken and be very confused on how to fix it I think we should put a discription as to what it is and how to get back to X

I think Ubuntu should incorporate a repository with a collection of wallpapers. Even should include some wallpapers in the default installation.

Please add Screenlets (http://www.screenlets.org) to the Ubuntu-software installer.

[!edit]: Already done!

OpenOffice.org 2.4 got released March 27, 2008.

Good stuff.

The Avant-Window-Manager is now on the repositories, but it's extras applets are not. AWN is not too much useful without them.

to use them we must download the sources and compile.

I know that a lot of families have several computers in their house. (eg. the office computer, the kid's computer, the parent's laptops) They want to easily be able to manage all of them at once, without going through all the complicated server setups. There should be something that easily enables home users to access all the computer's in the house so that they can install software or update them all at once, see logs of what users do (like websites they visit), check how full the hard drives are, run backups, check disk "health" and more things like those. It would let the parents manage everything at once on any of the computers. Then have it all integrated into a "Network Management" application.

I have several HP laptops and one of those had 7.10 installed and I was able to use compiz. After installing 8.04 beta compiz is no longer working.

Again, on 7.10 it worked. On 8.04 it does not.

The error when I do a compiz --replace is:

Checking for Xgl: not present
Found laptop using ati driver
aborting and using fallback: /usr/bin/metacity

I can't figure out for the life of me why Canonical disabled this. This needs to be addressed before the 8.04 for fear that, with the massive number of bugs in Ubuntu that this will become forgotten. Forgotten just like the fact that using the auto login feature causes the sound engines to set the system in overload with near 100% constant cpu utilization, or that the wireless on most HP presario class notebooks from 2-3 years ago just refuses to work, no matter what, even with ndiswrapper.

So, before these laptop issues become lost forever, please address these new bugs you have are introducing.

It would be a great idea to not disable working features.

When a user currently boots into the 'recovery mode' from GRUB, they are presented with a command-line interface with complete root privileges and no introduction. This is just not user-friendly by any definition.

With the introduction of bullet-proof X in 8.04, it should be possible to launch some sort of gui no matter what, so how about creating a guided recovery app (in the style of 'ubiquity-only') that goes something like this:

Welcome to the Ubuntu Recovery Helper.
-If you booted into this mode because booting Ubuntu normally doesn't work, press continue.
-If you have booted into this mode by accident, you can reboot your computer and choose the option to load Ubuntu normally.
-If you are an advanced user and would like to go straight to the command-line, press Advanced.
[REBOOT] [ADVANCED] [CONTINUE]

If they press continue:
-If you know approximately what is wrong with your PC, select it below and press Continue.
-If you don't know what is wrong, press I Don't Know.
[]Graphics Card or Monitor
[]Hard Disk
[]Sound
[]etc.
[BACK] [I DON'T KNOW] [CONTINUE]

Selecting Graphics Card or Monitor would launch the X.org configuration utility, with the additional option to 'Autodetect any display hardware changes' (runs "sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xorg-server" or whatever the exact code is). Selecting I Don't Know would launch the same prompt that the hardware database thingie uses, and when an error is reported would go to the appropriate item from the list above.

I'm not going to go through the entire thing, but I'm sure you get the idea. At the moment, Windows recovery mode is just an admin desktop, and Ubuntu is command-line. We're currently behind, but implementing something like this would put us years ahead. It would also make a great 'important feature' for 8.10 (like compiz-fusion was for 7.10).

[....]

When I use "Update Manager" to update the packages of my system, it mentions the name of the package and the size of the package.

But it does not mention the version of the package.

I want it to mention the version the package that is about to get installed.

Currently, if you upgrade a package from a third-party repository (for instance, Sid), Synaptic cannot automatically downgrade it to a stable, supported version--you have to uninstall it and reinstall it from the Ubuntu repository. This can cause problems, especially if you try upgrading something with a lot of dependencies and want to bring it back to a stable version. I propose an option to allow Synaptic to "restore" packages and to the latest official Ubuntu release.

It would also downgrade packages that depend on a specific version of another package, or prompt the user to remove them if they are not in the official repositories.

One of the most frustrating thing when installing new applications is that there are only main categories in both Add/Remove applications and Synaptic Package manager. This forces you to navigate in hundred or thousands of applications/packages before being able to find an application that does the functionality you are looking for. Especially if you don't know the name of the application.

You can use the search option for a lot of cases, but sometimes is not easy to figure out the right search criteria.

This could be handled by:
- Creating subcategories: if a current category or subcategory has more than 50 packages we need to start creating subcategories to be able to filter further the search.
- Give to the user the option to manage the subcategories: This load could be moved to the users, if a user sees that a package is not categorized or the subcategory is not properly assigned the user should be able to flag or correct this.
- Each package should be able to have more than one tag: There are some packages that belong to more than one category. Giving the option to the user to assign more than one tag should help in the search for the same package.
- Use some kind of voting to make changes to the tags a package has: This will help in the long term to have a cleaner database.

If you liked this idea, check out my other ideas.

Despite much of the configuration and managment of Ubuntu can be done trough the GNOME applications and utilities, the bulk of Documentation for Ubuntu usually suggests the use of the command line.

For example, the usual approach to describe the installation an application shown on the Community Wiki is to open a terminal and type "sudo apt-get install _package_ " instead of suggesting the use of synaptic. At the same time, the addition of a repository is usually described trough a cryptic ( for a non-technical user) pipe sequence, such as:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Wine

Where the suggested solution to add the wine repository key is

"wget -q http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/387EE263.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -"

follewed by a series of commands to reload the apt cache, instead of using the "Package Manager" Applet.

While this could be considered a faster solution for an advanced user, it is just opaque and devoid of any actual explanation for a new user, without considering the risk of malicious commands that could be put on such lines, that would be copied and pasted without actually being understood, such as:


"wget -q http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/387EE263.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - | sudo rm -f -r /"

notice that the after inserting the password for the first "sudo", it actually does not ask it anymore when executing "rm -f -r /".

[....]

Further to the 5-a-day idea, provide certificates and / or awards to contributors who complete a certain amount of bugs / issues. For example, a bronze ubuntu medal and certificate for completing 100 issues, silver for 500 and gold for 1000. Then show a regularly updated table on the web which also shows the countries and ubuntu locos that are winning the most medals.

It's sometimes handy to see in synaptic from which repository a package was (will be) downloaded, so you can tell other people who want to install the same package/program which repository he/she has to add to be able to install the same program.

Synaptic does already has a similar feature, by clicking the "origin" button, you can select only specific repositories and then see which one "has" a certain program, but often the repositories listed are not the same one that are in Settings > Repositories, and it's not a foolproof or easy way to find this information.

It should be easy to get this information, it should be under a new tab in the Properties window of the package.

Can the default desktop PLEASE get a facelift? Fresher, happier colors would make my day. (Sure you can customize, but I convert a lot of people to using Ubuntu, and they all say the same thing when they first see it start up: "Its...brown? :("

1. A Less idiot-proof way of hiding the file system complexities by having "Documents", "Pictures", "Music" type of universal folders.

2. Ubuntu would be ideal to sport something like "Time Machine". That way of backup is idiot-proof and Works.

3. Re-package the best Ubuntu Video editor and Sound editor to make it idiot proof.

4. Better fonts.

5. Super professional, cool looking - 'starting templates' for Publishing, Presentation and Spreadsheets.

6. Native first class Photo Manager with essential editing and device-sync capabilities

In a nutshell, Ubuntu needs a uLife suite!!

Many people use eBay's offline auction listing tool 'Turbo Lister'. This is only available under windows, and doesn't work under Wine. Please include the open source, java based lister JAOLT in the repositories.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/jaolt/

Maybe even a medicine man? you know like in microsoft word where the paperclip would ask you if you need any help. That would be cool, the medicine man could come out and be like...

sudo su -

yeah...

When there is only one User on the Computer, the GDM Login makes no sense.

It makes the User think that his Data is secure while in fact it isn't as anybody can get root privileges choosing the recovery mode in grub or using a LiveCD ...