Contributor longtimeuser

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.

[....]

One of the things included in Hardy was ufw (Uncomplicated firewall wall), but everything has to be done via CLI. There is a very nice GUI frontend being developed for it and it would be nice if it is bundled as a default package.

Links to the project:
https://launchpad.net/gui-ufw
http://gufw.tuxfamily.org/index.html

Gnome-panel drops behind other desktops in the look and feel of the panel.

There are loads of Ideas e.g. on gnome-look.org about improving the panel and especially the menu. It looks like a lot of people don't like the situation right now.

It would be nice to have some discussion, how gnome-panel could be improved.

Please notice, this is not about changing the panel into a dock, but about extending its funktionallity and look and feel while keeping what we already have, and works well.

One of Ubuntu's best features is the Update Manager. It updates essential software automatically, greatly alleviating a common user frustration. Just imagine how great it would be if the Updagte Manager also updated programs like Thunderbird, the GIMP, and OpenOffice. Windows and Mac would simply not be able to compete with such a feature due to their software restrictions ($$$).

In order for this to happen, Canonical's software repositories must be updated more often.

Outdated repositories also make it extremely difficult for users to upgrade their software manually. The creators of programs like Firefox and Songbird usually do not provide .deb files for new versions of their software. Thus, users must wait for major repository updates (once every 6 months) before they can upgrade their software.

Please update major software (Firefox, Thunderbird, Songbird, OpenOffice, the GIMP, etc) in the repositories more often. As I said, it would give Ubuntu a huge edge over Windows and Mac and greatly improve the usability of the Operating System overall.

The live CD is the first thing many people see when trying Ubuntu and it can be a turtle even on the best systems. This is hardly putting our best face forward.

The Live CD needs to be better optimized for responsiveness to make for a better user experience.

Addendum:

The constraints of a Live CD are hard to work with especially all the different hardware out there. I think with the Live CD less is more.
Most people that take it as a test drive are going to look through the menus for things that look familiar to what they know and try browsing the net. For the most part they are not going to be doing anything intensive. I think one option is reducing the memory footprint and services loaded. I'm sure there are other suggestions that you and the developers may have.

Some users post ideas by giving only the title of it without a description.

Even if the idea is brilliant, other users tend to demote it because there is not one word of explanation!


I think ideas without a description should be deleted.
Moreover, it shouldn't be possible to add an idea without a description. It is rather easy to implement.


Giving a few words of explanation doesn't require much effort.
Helping other Users and Developers to understand your idea is a matter of Your respect for the Ubuntu Community.

Thank You.

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

Make a sound theme contest or at least a contest for startup and shutdown sounds the winner(s) of which will be included in the next release.

Just like idea #384: Engage DeviantArt for Ubuntu 8.10 theme competition

Some ideas are apparently being flagged as duplicates when they are not. An example of this is idea #4 and idea #1399 which are NOT the same thing. There needs to be a facility in Brainstorm to "appeal" a duplicate label.

ubuntu usplash background is very dull, just dark black.
Why not make it brown or any other suitable color?

Take a look on Fedora and OpenSUSE
http://media.arstechnica.com/news.media/450/opensuse_boot.png
http://media.arstechnica.com/news.media/450/fedora_boot.png

Is it possible to add a graphical tool to join easier a NFS server?

It would be able to :
- install nfs-common automatically
- create a new default directory (i.e /media/nfs) or by a manual choice
- set ip address of NFS server
- submit previous datas to /etc/fstab
- mount NFS file system, (like sudo mount -a)
- (optionally) seek for all nfs servers on local network

I think than nautilus-connect-server is good place to add this stuff.

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.

Standard is this terrible BEEP noise when the computer failures. Why are not activated from the beginning pleasant system sounds? There is the possibility to change the system sounds manually in the preferences. The implemented sounds are a little bit boring and hear all the same.


Like the Borealis sound theme or something else.

Hear yourself

http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/%22Borealis%22+sound+theme?content=1 2584

Make a template competition for OpenOffice.org

We should have a competition where our most skilled artists, the deviantART community and everybody can submit their templates for OpenOffice.org.

We could get some real professional-looking templates.

Then we have a voting or panel who picks out the best contributions for inclusion.

This will be fun, involve the community and get us some really great templates.

Nautilus could detect if a folder contains a majority of a certain type of files and adapt the type and number of columns to provide more useful details.

I think of pictures folders, where it could show exif informations about pictures like the resolution of the picture and its capture date (in addition to the modification date)

I also think of music folders, where it could show the bitrate,the length and the (ID3) tags of the music files.
I think this would be very useful.

In addition, the ability to add/remove columns should be available by the right click on the listview header.

Please see the comments for further ideas

From #6245 (merged):

Having an extra column in the list showing something like "23x456" would be ideal, because you could see the info for all the files in the folder at once.

Have the info in the status-bar would be better than what we've got currently (right-click->properties->image shows the info in Nautilus, but it's not very efficient)

Even on my Athlon 64, when I resize windows, it is not particularly smooth.

Can this be smoothened?

The "About Me" utility under System->Preferences is a nifty way to store information like your name, phone number, etc.

Do many people use it? I think not. Why? Because you have NO idea which applications read this information and what they do with it.

Either allow me to control which applications read this information so I can restrict access on a field level or get rid of the thing entirely. For example, I do not want Pigin/IRC channels to have access to my home phone number, etc.

As it is, it has that creepy, privacy-invading feel of Windows that made me move to Ubuntu in the first place. Time to fix it or lose it.

Example, if I download updates for Ubuntu, or I download some torrent file, or something, then I don't want my important stuff such as SSH, IRC, IM, VoIP to get lagged.

So you have the important traffic prioritized, and have non-important traffic like apt-get and torrents de-prioritized.

This way I can do stuff like listen to online radio without skips, or play an online game without lag, or administer a server remotely with SSH without type-lag, have a VoIP conversation without skips, or chat on IRC or Pidgin without delays, all the same time while I am fetching updates, and downloading movies on BitTorerent.

Nautilus does its job as a light file manager. However, as Gnome's default file manager, I think it could use a lot more love than what it is given. This could include:

- Tabbed browsing! Most browsers today support tabbed browsing, but still few file managers. This doesn't really make sense now does it?
- Better remote connection/sftp handling. The current one is AWFUL. Slow, sluggish, buggy. Take example on Konqueror!
- SVN integration has been waved at. I find it a cool idea, even if only as a plugin.
- Speaking of plugins... those also need some love. How many plugins are there for Nautilus? Most users don't even know Nautilus can be enhanced.
- File tooltips - once again, take example on Konqueror / Windows explorer.

Edit: A few more ideas around Brainstorm:
- Separation of files and folders
- Slider bar for zoom
- A better icon management
- The ability to explode folders

Those are just a handful of ideas. My main concern is Nautilus is being underdeveloped, and the solid alternative is only non-Gnome (Konqueror).


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

Google could put Ubuntu-style logo on their homepage on Hardy release day :). By the way, they use Ubuntu on their desktop computers.