Contributor jsmidt

Everyone is familiar with Open Office’s office suite or Firefox/Mozzilla’s internet suite of Firefox and Thunderbird. Both suites have found homes in Linux and are a staple in many Linux distros.(IMHO) These two application suites have made Linux a viable OS in desktop computing. Yes, I do know other alternatives to OOO and FF are available and, competition is a good thing.

The time has now come for a multi-media Application Suite for the OSS community. Lets face it, Linux lacks many of the creative and multi-media tools that it needs to be a real desktop OS. Many new users to Ubuntu/ Linux just need a simple way to edit video, audio and pics. I know that many apps already exist for these needs but, most of these apps fall short and do not integrate with one another(IMHO).

Is there a really solid OSS video editor for the home video enthusiast? This is what I see with many OSS video editors: Cinelerra is overkill and it lacks the ability to capture DV video. Kino and Diva are just to basic. Pitivi just combines clips, Kdenlive is still very buggy (in beta) also, getting firewire to work is also a real pain for video editing applications too.

A simple to use video editor is much needed in the home user Ubuntu/ Linux desktop. While were talking about video Apps how about integrating a video editor with a separate DVD Video creation app? Is this starting to sound like iMovie and iDVD?

Image editing in Linux needs work too, Gimp is OK for simple editing but should combine a photo manager and needs some work with some of the core tools and its UI to make it easer for the home user. Once more, the Image app should be able to work with the video editing and DVD creation software.

If these apps were created and worked well, a natural side effect could be a push in the use of free or open source formats for media such as ogg. Having a multimedia application suite for creation that pushes open media formats such as OGG would be huge!

So the BIG question is how do you make money off developing this Application suite? Easy, all of these apps create multimedia files that either have hard copy equivalents or can be uploaded to sharing sites like youtube or flicker.

[....]

Big problem that not only affects firefox 2, it also happens on firefox 3 beta and hasn't been resolved yet.

I get at least 4 or 5 crashes daily on older hardware. But even on new modern hardware i still get 1 or 2 crashes.

As everyone knows, the crashes happen the most when viewing heavy flash (be it fullscreen video, flash game, a few big flash ads on websites, etc.). It specifically happens when changing sites (visible crash) or when closing the browser (invisible crash, but FF does not free up the memory)

While i have a "killall firefox-bin" launcher icon on my desktop, sometimes my system becomes so unresponsive because it stays in memory and i have to try to reboot or force a system shutdown.

Anyway this can be easily fixed (when implemented) if the process is killed after a crash, freeing up the memory and making the system usable again.

sadly i had to install the windows version of Firefox + flash in Wine to avoid the crashing.... so why do we have a buggy linux version that won't even detect the crash and free up the mem??

Please release future releases in DVD ISO distro's too please.
I use the unoficial DVD ISO's to set up many machines: servers, desktops, laptops, gnome & kde, and use same ISO for USB live-pendrive setup. On-site bootup & troubleshooting
Need something that is as complete as possible for when I do not have access to the web, and don't want to go digging around for some driver that should have been there to start off with (know this could be problematic for some archane hardware). Aslo include drivers for Intel Mac's & eeePC, as this is standardised hardware

i like very much suspend option, but in some case i want to donwload a file or application via apt-get, so i put the file to download with wget (or installing using apt-get) and leave the machine, after a wile the machine is going to suspend and the download file is paused.

IDEA: it would be interesting put the next option in the "power preference": don't suspend the PC if i am downloading.

(sorry for my english)

For those who not have heard about Nouveau, it's a project working on reverse-engineering and coding what is supposed to be working OSS (3d)drivers for X.

In its current state it probably is not stable enough to become a part of the default install, replacing the NV driver, but I think it would be great to have the Nouveau drivers available for testing in some standard repos (universe or multiverse or something).

The drivers should probably be updated quite often to keep up with the development, as it is, as mentioned, not "production-ready" yet.

Either way, if someone want to be able to use them at a daily basis, maybe a -experimental/git and one -stable could be produced for the different use cases.

more info about Nouveau at: http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/

First off, I know that we arent Apple. It is not good to have a wicked GUI for a useless program. But, the GUI does a lot for the user. I think that the interface of Time Vault looks a little complex- and if it were to resemble Time Machine (OS X) it would be much more intuitive and easy to use. I was at the store today and could go onto Time Machine and use it- just because it was so simple. The interface wowed me and I just felt I could connect to it. That I feel is very important. I'm not just saying to make the timevault interface look 3d for the sake of pretty, but because it would help people to effectively use Ubuntu, what we aim for all along.

I'm new to Ubuntu and I'm trying to install Java because LogMeIn requires it. I'm having a heck of a time getting Java installed and working with FireFox.

Please make it easy for users to install/update Java.

I run Ubuntu since Breezy and logically, I upgrade it every 6 months (on the same computer). Unfortunately, after each upgrade, I got things not working any more (out of the box).
Sometimes, it's the soundcard who was working before and doesn't work anymore. Sometimes, it's the wifi. Sometimes, it's my scanner...And I'm working around every 6 months...
Stability is one of the great advantages of Linux vs Windows.
Please, try to improve it between versions, for long term users.

Thunderbird's new mail notifications should be visible in the system tray just like in kde, windows, etc

I ran into a guy who did something to screw up his security settings and couldn't find out precisely what. he eventually had to reinstall. A "System Restore" option would have been a good idea for him. I don't think it wil be useful as it would be under Windows, but in the event of a lockout or something getting seriously broken, it would be a godsend to new users. It could be as simple as a cron script that takes snaphosts of the system after every logout or administrative change and allows you to rollback the changes.

Hi,

I suggest to the Ubuntu community, we should have a unique and complete development studio, in order to create great applications very coupled to the Operating System, in order to take advantage of the environment, standardize programming languages and not to fill up the system resources with a lot of interpreters, runtime or whatever frameworks.

For example, on Mac OS they have XCode, in Window$ Visual Studio, inclusive on KDE they have KDeveloper.

From my experience, when I try to make some software for ubuntu, I find great quantity of software development tools which makes difficult the choice.

I know that freedom comes with the liberty to choose too, and is ok, but in this aspect i thought that as a community we need to follow a North, and not everyone go to everywhere without any roadmap, each one going some on foot, some on cars, and in other parts (Mac, Win) going on airplanes...

If you want to read in Spanish go to my website

* 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

On the worldmap show timezones, not cities. Timezones are just much bigger targets for the mouse.
In the selection field below, make a scrollbar for quicker scrolling.
Make the selection field typeable. Instead of scrolling through a long list i should be able to type something like "sweden" or "nebraska" or "gmt+3" and the computer should understand what timezone is meant.
Also do not set the clock, if no timezone was asked. Today, Wubi installations do not ask the timezone, but still set the clock. It makes no sense.

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.

In the Add/remove toolbox is a popularity rating of each app. It is completely unobjective, since all the by default installed applications get 5 stars. I propose to make this system votable. An user can click a rating of an app if he thinks it's usefull for him, rating gets uploaded then. This gives a much better overview of good quality apps, especially for new users. It can also be helpful for decisions which apps should be in the default distro.

Having the new Amazon mp3 download software is a great first step. But what we need to persuade Amazon to do is create a version of the downloader that works directly in our music applications via a plugin, so you can purchase music directly in your application much the same way you can purchase tunes directly from iTunes.

Several wiki articles allude to the fact that there is/was an art.ubuntu.com, and that you can submit art to it. o:

a quick google search tells me it was attacked and is planned for relaunch soon. That was said in November. :/

Could we please get this back up?!

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.

I believe one of the biggest hurdles for new users is not being familiar with how/where ubuntu installs things. I propose that a map be created describing the location and contents of default installation directories. For example, it could be a map of the file structure, where newbies could go to find out just what the heck is stored in the ./whatever directory, and how it interacts with other parts of the system. I'm thinking a huge tree diagram that would simply represent the contents and relationships of ubuntu files and directories, from the kernel on down through /home. It will make it a lot more appealing to customize and/or start fidgeting if you know EXACTLY what you are dealing with and how it might affect your system. I know something like this exists somewhere, it just needs to be available to the end-users in one place, in pictorial form.

Turn fast and light the Gnome enviroment with a fast boot. Today, a login in GDM cost 10 or 20 seconds to load a user desktop in one fast computer.
KDE 4.0.1 is new but is visible more light than Gnome.