Contributor hunteke

When Ubuntu starts, it goes through the same routine every time, checking CPUs, partitions, everything. But what if nothing's changed since the last time it booted?

My idea is for Ubuntu to save a state once you reach the login screen, so when you start your system again, it can simply resume from there (much like awakening a system from hibernate), and booting would be much quicker.

However, it would still be necessary to check filesystems (fdisk) every once in a while, like Ubuntu does already.

As not all systems support hibernation and there are bound to be more problems than I realise with my (fairly limited) technical knowledge, this should of course be optional, at first.

Most of us have winkeys in keyboard and many use it.
Make this keyboard layouts default,
because it will not affect people without winkeys.

I would like grub to only show boot options (like which kernel you want to boot or the safe mode option) when the user needs that menu. 90% of the times you just want to boot up your "normal" kernel so I think it would be a whole lot more user friendly if that was booted by default and instead there was a notification "press 'key' for advanced options".

Create a category "what not to post on brainstorm" and move implemented ideas, bug reports, "not an idea" etc to this category. This is a better option than deletion, and it would serve a purpose of telling other users what not to post.

Related to this idea/discussion: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/70/

Currently when bulletproof-x is invoked, it only tries 4:3 resolutions and if I connect it to a hdtv, the only one there that is supported is 640x480. This doesn't give me enough room to reconfigure the xorg.conf file using nvidia's x configuration tool. I propose we include 1280x720, 1280x800, 1920x1080, and 1920x1200. This way when it's connected to a hdtv, it'll use one that is useful.

Windows Vista has a built in benchmarking system, which helps in showing what your computer is built to run. It would be nice to have a feature like this in Ubuntu. This would help people know what their computer is capable of running, and for users of older computers, help find lighter applications based on their performance ratings.

Many people have trouble installing Ubuntu alone. I will list here some common problems people find and in the end I will propose some solutions.

Attitudes like: "If the user doesn't know how to partition he/she should ask for help from someone else more experienced" are not really the solution to attract new users (mainly people having their first Linux experience or without internet access).

Some problems:
1. One of the first things the partitioner does is to ask what kind of partition should be created. Well, more than 50% of the users would say: What is a partition ? (before even have to ask themselves "Why should I do it?").

2. People don't know they should create a "/" partition (does it sounds any intuitive at first glance ?)

3. People don't know why do they have to do it because "in te system X I don't need to do it ! Everything simply works out of the box". We should not think it as any natural concept.

Off course it has many more problems. Let us stop here and show some possibilities:

- An introductory screen with short and acurate information. One suggestion is:

First screen:
"Now you may choose to have your disk partitioned. This process can make your system more secure, responsive and easy to manage. "

Second Screen:
"Some advantages of partioning:
-Frequently people have their personal data (internet content, projects, documents under construction), system data (installed programs, configuration files, etc.) and some shared data (like music, video, documents, etc.). If you have more than one system you should use partitions to organize it. If you have only one system you may use partitions to separate the contents from each other. This technique permits, for example, one to erase the whole system data preserving your personal and shared data and allowing you to install a new system with your old content.

[....]

When you search in nautilus, you have to right click + select properties, to view the files path. It would be very nice to have a column with paths, or a breadcrumb menu for the selected file. A feature with "open folder which contains the file" is also necessary.

After a year on Linux, I was kinda pissed today when I made my fonts look twice as nice despite having already enabled hinting and smoothing from Gnome's Appearance > Fonts GUI.

It turns out you need to copy or symlink files from /etc/fonts/conf.avail/ to /etc/fonts/conf.d/
(EDIT: This is done for you on *fresh* installs of Ubuntu Hardy or above)

The changes I needed to apply are in the script I just made:

cd /etc/fonts/conf.d/
sudo rm 10-antialias.conf 10-hinting-medium.conf 10-no-sub-pixel.conf 70-no-bitmaps.conf

sudo ln -sf ../conf.avail/10-autohint.conf .
sudo ln -sf ../conf.avail/10-hinting-medium.conf .
sudo ln -sf ../conf.avail/10-no-sub-pixel.conf .
sudo ln -sf ../conf.avail/70-no-bitmaps.conf .

(followed by restarting X)

I believe this should be at least checked if not done for you. At very least, you should be warned in some way that the full effects of hinting and smoothing are not being applied.

This is probably not super-critical in this day and age of monolithically-sized hard-drives on the cheap, but it does pertain to smaller units such as the EeePC, and perhaps older machines.

Synaptic and Apt-Get have a great feature whereby the tool estimates the download size and expected drive usage upon installation, however it doesn't compare that value against the actual free drive space on the system. It is perfectly possible to attempt to download 100MB worth of updates that will consume 200MB of disk space after installation (total 300MB) when you only have 50MB of actual disk space free.

A simple query of the drive and a message dialog advising that the downloads and/or installation cannot be completed due to lack of space would save many a new user from tearing their hair out when Apt-Get kicks up a stink about being unable to perform any other task (such as removing apps to make space) because it has an unfinished installation that needs to be sorted out first.

The idea is to have a simple fund to which people could donate. The fund should be used exclusively to pay open source developers or documenters.[1] To get paid, the developers/documenters (henceforth just "developers") must develop and enhance open source projects against some sort of viable metric.

The projects to be tackled should be voted on by members of the charity. A member of the charity is one who is a member of the charity website. In this way, "mere mortals" could have a vote on what ideas developers are to work.

There should be no special disposition given to those who give money to the charity.[2] People could give money earmarked in one of two ways: directly payable to any developer for the charity, or to be used to build an endowment.[3]
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[1] Absolutely no one else should receive money from the charity fund. No administrator, no board member, no hosting provider, no one. Only developers.

[2] This is expected to weed out those trying to influence the charity through money, and to garner more (smaller) donations from a range of people

[3] The idea behind the endowment is to make the charity self-sustaining and growing. Thus, part of the proceeds should be reinvested into the endowment itself, and the rest should be dispersed to developers.

Create a standard way of updating a BIOS from Linux. Even integrate it into the update manager.

When my laptop resumes, there is often a popup note in the system notification area that says there were problems sleeping. It advises me to look at the help file for more information, but it doesn't link to the helpfile, nor does it tell me what sort of problems there were.

It would be much better if it told me what sort of problems, or at least had a button that when pressed showed what the problems were.

And if it refers to a help file, then it should link to that file.

actually mid files cant be played in totem nor any other music players, i have to use timidity to do that, i know what you must be thinking: "you have timidity, what are you asking for", the problem is that timidity is console, and a graphical interface to do this is neede, so we need codecs for this, maybe gstreamer need to add this codec to its pack.

The Hardy Heron T-shirts were absolutely fabulous!

I really think the T-shirts could be produced as sort of a collectable (or series) of shirts, releasing quality shirts upon every release and make it have a sort of "gotta catch em all" spin to it.

You could compare it to Hard-Rock Café wich has collectable shirts from every single HC around the world. Some people made a real sport out of getting their hands on all of those. Thus spreading the word on Hard-Rock Café (almost like a viral marketing campaign).

Ubuntu could do the same if they keep up the quality of the Hardy shirt (please no more stretched out monkeys guys :P).

Hope you like the idea!

Brainstormers should see which ideas are being considered for, and/or will be represented at the upcoming Ubuntu Developer Summit for Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope.

According to the recent announcement outlining sponsorship requests for UDS
http://www.jonobacon.org/?p=1278

The first step in applying for summit sponsorship is:

"Go to Ubuntu Brainstorm and pick out a bunch of ideas on there that you are interested in working on for the Ubuntu 9.04 release. Remember, we expect all sponsored participants to lead at least one discussion for a Brainstorm idea, but we also expect you to attend a number of additional sessions. Note down the brainstorm ideas you are interested in."

The Brainstorm website should be linked with the application site, so that Brainstormers can see which ideas are being considered and/or will be represented at the summit.

I really like to see an option in calculator to switch to tape mode, like in this picture made with gimp:

http://img296.imageshack.us/img296/8210/calcnewnn6.png

Gnome's "Take Screenshot" application should be extended to also allow the desktop to be recorded as a video. This would be used heavily by many power users, including those who like to showoff compiz to friends, to help show newbie family how do to some things they are having trouble with, and those who work on video tutorials.

Show a counter of downloads/updates of the last Ubuntu release in ubuntu.com (when Intrepid Ibex go out, not now).

A new way of count Ubuntu users.

The reason people stick to Windows is because of familiarity. They've been using it as kids. While there might be some flaws in Ubuntu, they can all go with increased awareness and familiarity of the OS. More familiarity means more ease of use, more ease of use means more user share, more user share means more developers, more developers means better code, better code means lesser flaws. So what the community should try on a voluntary basis is to push schools to teach Ubuntu in OS basics to kids. The little kiddie book that tells you how to click on the start menu and open paint in windows should also tell you how to click on Applications and open the terminal. If kids are made aware of the existence of another OS, and schools install it on their computers and make it readily available for the kids to use at home (CDs with school books), they won't find using Ubuntu a pain. They'll grow onto it and it'll be natural for them to use Ubuntu.

*EDIT->One more thing: more users->more developers also means more compatibility and supported applications.