Contributor leu

It has become obvious that Grub2 needs some extra programming help, as Grub-legacy will no longer be adding new features and the end of Grub2 is nowhere in sight. Canonical should allocate 1 or 2 programmers for a few months to help complete grub2 quickly, so that X86 support might be complete in time for Interpid Ipex.

One could argue that the boot loader is the most important part of the operating system, because if it doesn't work properly (which it hasn't been for some of us), it can prevent every OS from working on the computer. We should treat it with respect, and help them. Despite grubs importance, programmers generally enjoy working on more exciting projects like Gnome or KDE, which is one reason why development is slow.

Grub2 fixes a lot of previous brainstorm ideas including many booting issues (like mine), so completion would close a lot of bugs, whilst also making Ubuntu more user friendly because Grub2 deals with booting issues better.

Voting for this ensures that Canonical allocates some developers to the Grub2 project, which would be a big win for both Ubuntu and linux in general!

Planned Features for Grub 2
* Rescue mode saves unbootable cases. Stage 1.5 was eliminated.
* Dynamic loading of modules in order to extend itself at the run time rather than at the build time.
* Graphical interface.
* Fix design mistakes in GRUB Legacy, which could not be solved for backward-compatibility, such as the way of numbering partitions.
* Scripting support, such as conditionals, loops, variables and functions.
* Cross-platform installation which allows for installing GRUB from a different architecture.
* Internationalization. This includes support for non-ASCII character code, message catalogs like gettext, fonts, graphics console, and so on.
* Portability for various architectures.
* Modular, hierarchical, object-oriented framework for file systems, files, devices, drives, terminals, commands, partition tables and OS loaders.

[....]

as the title says: it is a good idea to add grub 2 to intrepid

With the millionth vote coming up, it's time to expand brainstorm to become the de facto site where developers and users of various OSS projects connect to share ideas.

The way I envision this is:
- As a user with an idea for a particular project (let's say Thunderbird), I would do the following to submit it:
1. Select "Thunderbird" from a drop down of various projects.
2. Select the category of the idea.
3. Check for duplicates.
4. Submit

- As a user who is using a certain set of software (let's say Ubuntu, Thunderbird, Gnome Do). I would, in my profile:
1. Select to filter ideas only for the software projects that I use (i.e., "Ubuntu, Thunderbird, Gnome Do" in this case).
2. That way ideas that are not relevant to me will not be displayed, and I will only see the top daily ideas that interest me.

- As a developer of a particular project (e.g., Pidgin), I would have the option to:
1. Display the top ideas for my project ("Pidgin" in this case)
2. Comment on- and manage ideas related to my project

Further down the road, this could be integrated into the software by providing an open "idea" API. So that right from the software's menu I could select Help > Submit Idea.

As this site has proven our community is full of great ideas. What we need is to expand this so that more OSS projects can benefit. What do you guys think?

My printer, a Laserjet 1200, is pretty common and is supported by Ubuntu automatically. But I rarely print from it because it stretches my print output, vertically. For example, I have a table in OpenOffice Calc, as a to-do list organized by both importance and urgency, set up to print exactly in a certain way from OpenOffice on Windows XP. But when I open the same document on my Ubuntu computer, it prints stretched out more vertically, so that it doesn't all fit on one sheet. This is printing to the same exact printer. This seems to be the same with other programs.

Multiple users can be logged in by using the user switching. But when the second user forgets about the first one and tries to shut down the computer, no warning pops up and it kills all the sessions silently. That's really bad, because all the unsaved work of the first user is completely lost. It would be *so easy* just to pop up confirmation dialog saying, that other users are still logged in and the shutdown can lose their unsaved data. In the fast-user-switch-applet we can see users currently logged in, so this is really a matter of few lines of code to implement. It would often save a lot of cursing. Windows have this functionality.

Example: Alice is working with Ubuntu. Bob wants to read his email quickly. Alice fast-switches to Bob account. Bob reads his email, forgets about Alice's running session and shuts down the computer. All Alice's unsaved work is lost. This wouldn't happen with the confirmation dialog.

OpenOffice is a pretty flexible office suite but it's annoying to me when I'm writing a document with multiple languages in it and I need to specify the language of each paragraph for the spellchecker. Fortunately this is easy to do (in the right-click context menu) but I would love it if OpenOffice could automatically detect what language it should use to spellcheck each paragraph.

One approach: if the spellchecker notices that a given paragraph has an unusual number of errors (say, more than 50% of the words are caught by the spellchecker), it can check its installed langauges lists to see if the sentence gets less errors in any other languages. If so, switch the style of that paragraph / section to spellcheck in that language.

Ubuntu currently doesn't upgrade the kernel, it just keeps adding newer and newer kernels to the system.

Currently, the list of kernels installed on a Ubuntu system grows over time. This takes up additional disk space and adds clutter to the boot loader.

Ideally, older kernels should be removed automatically.

Maybe leave current and current-1, but not _all_ of them...

Right-mouse-click in nautilus should have an option to create a private secure encrypted folder (for example in your home dir or on your usb stick). All files and folders in this special folder should be automatically encrypted and still be usable like normal files (after providing a strong pass-phrase to unlock the folder).

In this way people/organizations/companies/governments who want to secure their usb sticks don't have to buy expensive usb sticks but can use average cheap usb sticks.

I am thinking about a special day for Intrepid Ibex, where all ubuntu supporters burn some CDs, stay in front of schools, universities, shops and other places where we could find our target group and give Intrepid Ibex for free to some people.

I hope there are enough Linux groups and users out there to find some volunteers.

And I hope that we could find something in the newspaper to read about it the day after or before or both.

That is for people who start pidgin automatically on boot time and always have to close the buddy list when the system boots.

I guess there is enough users that would really need program for this task, since printable CD/DVD medias and printers are out for years.

I hate it that I have to use Virtualbox with Windows JUST to use CD Label Print to print on such disks.

One solution that could work too, would be better Wine implementation for printers since CD Label Print reports there's no compatible printer found and just exists under Wine.

A fantastic front-end to OpenOffice has been developed. Currently it is only available for Windows, but will be ported to Linux shortly.

As this new front-end will be available under the GPL we should use it in Ubuntu (or see if upstream would be willing to include it).

OpenOffice is often accused of looking archaic, not only that but we need to catch up with the interface of Microsoft Office 2007. Something you might not notice at first glance are the new templates, they're far nicer than the ones OpenOffice ships with (shouldn't be difficult to remove the Chinese symbols if required).

Anything related to the system should, logically, be placed in the System menu.

Next time you sit back and relax, remember to chill out with an ubuntu beer..

Some ideas were talking about making plushy toys, etc. So why not also rebrand some beer, and hand it out at tech conferences. Ubuntu will be the most popular booth around.

And I know it sounds stupid, however, its a very good way to attract attention. For people who have never heard of ubuntu, it would encourage them to come to the booth and hang around with other diehard ubuntu users (and get the word out there).

Many new users are confused by device names such as /dev/sda1, /dev/sdb5, /dev/hda2, /dev/hdc4, etc.

So I propose to show volume labels (partition names) in the installer, to make it easier for users who install Ubuntu to know which partition they are installing on.

Screenshots:
* Before
* After

This will make it clearer and easier to install Ubuntu without any mistakes being done which might result in that a new user accidentally looses valuable data.

Already ubuntu user can connect to internet via network-manager applet, but it lacks some features:
1. There is no visual notification that indicates whether system is connected to internet or not.
2. You can not choose between dial-up connections via nm applet.

Add icons in the Update Manager, so that it shows what type of update it is, and how serious it is.

Look screenshot.
http://launchpadlibrarian.net/14500471/update-manager.png

Wine-doors is a great program to works alongside with Wine, with scripts to help in the installation of windows programs, I think it would be very usefull if it were included in the repositories...

I am not supporting any act of vandalism with stickers, but it would be neat to have a block of "try Ubuntu" post-it like stickers (so they do not damage any surface you stick them to).
It has already happened me twice to walk in town and see some monitor stuck in a BSOD... a post it samped below it would be the perfect real-world promotional move, even in non BSOD-involving cases... also they are good for taking notes when Tomboy is not an option.

Ok, I said an amenity but at least a funny one ;)

There are some programs, codecs, files which are not allowed to ship with the distribution and to have in the repos due to license reasons.
But a lot of users have them installed and new ubuntu users often want them, too. They want to listen to mp3, watch dvd or ...
I.e. acroread or libdvdcss could not be found, if you search in your packet manager.

Today I got a pdf and had to open it via acroread, because evince could not display everything. (guess there was something wrong with the pdf)
I missed acroread in the repos and searching around for adobe, pdf and so on and on, because I didn't know, that Adobe changed its license.

I think, it would be very comfortable, if one searches in the package manager and could find a hint, where to download the program, codec and other often looked for programs.

I would appreciate a short message like: "Due to license reasons this program can't be downloaded from this repo. Please have a look at ... and gpl-licence at ... for further information."

Wouldn't it be nice for new users, to find this info, if they look for a codec or something similar popular in the package manager?

I hope, I could make myself a bit clear. I am sorry for the inconvenience.