Contributor nedu

Nix is a purely functional package manager. It allows multiple versions of a package to be installed side-by-side, ensures that dependency specifications are complete, supports atomic upgrades and rollbacks, allows non-root users to install software, and has many other features. It is the basis of the NixOS Linux distribution, but it can be used equally well under other Unix systems.

These features seem to be superior to the current package management system. It would allow simple users to install applications on demand, uncluttered the current file system where you don't know which file is of which package and also provide superpowerfull control of package by its functional approach.

This seems like a superfeature that would take a huge amount of resources to implement, but maybe its time already to ask "what if?" and define a roadmap by which a migration could occur. Most likely it would require closely working with Debian distribution, and maybe even waiting until they migrate there first.

More information about nix:http://nixos.org/

User directories on ubuntu are easily a mess at the moment. They need more standardisation and more sense to remain clean. If you go to terminal/bash you may discover that your directory looks something like:


/home/auzy/Documents
/home/auzy/.Azureus (Hidden)
/home/auzy/.gnome2 (Hidden)
/home/auzy/Desktop
/home/auzy/.bashrc2 (Hidden)
/home/auzy/readme.rtf
/home/auzy/.Trash (Hidden)
/home/auzy/iffy.rtf
/home/auzy/delete me.rtf
/home/auzy/argggggg.c
/home/auzy/fgdhgfdhd.txt
/home/auzy/Music
/home/auzy/.ooffice (Hidden)
/home/auzy/friendsassignment.c
/home/auzy/friendsassignmentCopy.c
etc.


While you may note that anything with . is hidden normally, what if someone wants to delete the settings for a program? They need to manually unhide it, and sort through the dozens of directories in the home directory to find it. The problems with this is that:

a) Its messy, and certainly not a clean solution
b) Users cannot easily access their settings.
c) Everyones home directory is normally trashed with hundreds of other files, making it difficult to navigate.

[....]

The Kind of information new users and young people are excited to know about countries,nature etc but there resources are limited and they dont know where they can find complete information.A software will definitely help them collect information at one place.atleast ubuntu can provide online link to wikipedia inside ubuntu if they cant make full fledged software.

subpixel smoothing by default unless a CRT monitor is suspected

I would like to see a test given to the user after the installation to see what the user abilities are. Not hard questions, just everyday uses.

Based on the test, depending on their score, the user is only allowed to actually change or configure certain files directly.

Not everyone is allowed to be root, is the point I am trying to make, sort of.

Canonical shouldn't have to host a third party application repository when users already can (and do) add entries for third party application sources to /etc/apt/sources.list on the local machine.

Simply provide a mouse driven interface for adding /etc/apt/sources.list entries. This can pretty much use existing infrastructure with the addition of a mime description and a couple of quick shell scripts. Then Add/Remove programs allows the end user to use applications from selected third party vendors. (for example: the latest version of XEN, Wine, PostgreSQL, MPlayer, OpenOffice, games, etc.) which might not be tracked by Canonical via the backports repository)

This beats the heck out of using dpkg -i and having to manually resolving dependencies, and allows trusted vendors to provide automatic updates. (The digital pgp signing and dpkg maintain state stuff already exists for security).

When it's this easy to do let's make Ubuntu easy to use!

Change the african name “Ubuntu” to a different better name.
Give your proposition to a different, better, name to this system

It's a pain to search through a vast network, such as a campus network, where only about 20% of computers have public samba shares, and where computers tend to be switched on and off frequently.

Please create a program (even if not installed by default) which would periodically scan all network computers for public shares and show them in a list. Additionally it should be able to search through the shared files using wildcards etc.

There is a freeware (though not opensource) program with similar functionality for Windows (NetView), for which I haven't quite found an alternative in Linux.

Other convenient tools of this program are:

Network Scanner, which looks for computers on the network using several different methods, among which are pinging IP address masks (like 192.168.1-255.1-255), ARP and DNS lookups, etc. It then adds found computers together with information about them to a dynamic host list, which refreshes itself every so often, and every computer of which you can try to browse for shares (opening it by hostname or IP address). This list is the list the program uses to search files and shares on, not one provided the usual SMB way.

NetWatcher, which monitors incoming SMB connections and provides an easy way to manage (turn off/on) local SMB shares. Also it allows a quick way to disable all shares without deleting them, as well as to block specific IP addresses from reaching local public shares.

This is how it looks. The website of the program I described is here.

Leave comments, please! If you liked this idea, check out my other ideas.

We should make it take only 3 or 4 clicks to enable CPU clustering over a network. Every home user these days often have 3 or 4 computers in their household when half the time are simply sitting there browsing the web.

Users should be able to configure clustering in GCC (switch to DistCC), enable openmosix, maybe even set up programs like blender properly in a centralised location, and just need to click a button. That way everyone can use their computing resources more efficiently, and easily.

At the very least we should make it easier (not neccessarily include it in the main distribution). And small polish like this may not benefit many people, but the people who notice (your graphics and developer crowd for instance), will be eternally greatful. And, lets be honest, its a great sales pitch for many businesses :D

OSX already ships with a solution known as Xgrid which people can use, in its clients and servers. Xgrid has only failed because even Apple does not integrate it into their programs. OpenMosix for instance though is ready to go and can be made into an "out of the box" solution.

Sometime the filesystem check on boot may fail and some errors have to be fixed by a manual run of fsck.
For the unexperienced user dropping to a root shell is a bad idea. A little (ncurses based maybe) interface to help this situations would be much more "human".
Eventually the same could be applied to mount errors.

It should be possible to install a package with e.g. gdebi while synaptic is open. It's a shame! In the moment it isn't possible. :(

Nautilus normally determines the type of a file by looking at the first few bytes of its contents, like it is generally done in Linux.
This is also the most reliable method to do it.
But in some scenarios, when there is an older computer and a directory with several thousands of files, this slows things a great deal.
So i would like an option (which is off by default) to determine filetypes by extension only, like Windows explorer does.
The deluxe variant of this would be an option to do this only in directories, that have more than a certain number of files and revert to the normal Linux method otherwise.

Create a system that allows programmers force to use swap memory for any data that will not be used much over a program, it can assist in the performance of ubuntu in general since many systems become slow when they start to use for swap Data read / write continuously while others are stored and used every minute or more and saved in the real ram memory (Dependent on the dataflow)
This should be done by creating a function in C to be more call for example swapalloc and used as alloc
In systems with little of ram or when we run a lot of programs that would be very useful since it would organize our data in the memory necessary to expedite the power system.
In addition, a good option would be to force load programmes in the RAM and not in the swap as possible (as long as there RAM available), and these would be used much flow

Hello, long since used ubuntu and one thing I was always angry, we can only run a synaptic at the same time, I can not be in add / remove programs and installing something in a terminal with apt-get at the same time. My idea is to run more than one synaptic at the same time.

I just discovered that the folder /root/.Trash contains everything I ever deleted while using a root nautilus window to manage root-owned folders...

Suffice to say it wasn't empty... ;)

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/how-to-empty-root-trash.html

Perhaps with all the "Better trash bin" type ideas, this might have already been mentioned...

We need a button or link next to the empty trash button that says something like "Empty root trash" or even "View root trash" with a gksu prompt when pressed...

Or, this could be integrated into some sort of "Disk Cleanup" program.

downloads should go to $HOME/Downloads. XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR should be set to "$HOME/Downloads" instead of "$HOME/Desktop" in the file ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs.

This Downloads folder should be the default download location for firefox and this folder should be bookmarked in nautilus by xdg-user-dirs-gtk (like Music,Videos,Pictures and Documents).

RATIONALE :
* less cluttered desktop and/or homedir
* still easy to access your downloads

Actually, we have 5 wallpapers, 9 themes and 80+ SCREENSAVERS!!!

WHAT THE HELL!

Who need that amount of screensavers?

I think we should vote five to the default installation, and the other ones comes with a optional package?

Isn't gnome "keep it simple"?

For me just a "dim screen" is enough for default.

The /media directory has largely replaced the use of /mnt in auto mounting, It appears that this situation is a result of the FHS-2.3
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard):

/media/ Mount points for removable media such as CD-ROMs (appeared in FHS-2.3).
/mnt/ Temporarily mounted filesystems.

While I think the proposal still makes sense because the difference between the two directories is minor, on second though I would err on the side of caution and leave the situation as it is to preserve FHS compliance.

Each time I change my partitions, I have to do 'it' again. Yes, you know what I mean. Change /etc/fstab to point to the new partitions. Or suppose I insert a USB harddisk with more than one partition. I either have to mount those partitions myself, or edit, yes again, /etc/fstab. But then I reboot without the external drive attached.... "Kernel panic, filesystem not found". That happens automatically when you have a ext2/ext3 filesystem in /etc/fstab that doesn't exist.

Now, you might say "You don't often change your partitions, do you?" Yes, that's true. But think of a newbie. Installs Ubuntu, likes Ubuntu, says "Hey this Linux thing is wicked, lets try uhm... say Mandriva". Good, he installs Mandriva, but what happens? The partitions are messed up, Ubuntu won't boot anymore. In a very bad case, the previous Ubuntu /-partition had the same name as the /-partiton of the other Linux install, resulting in something very messy.

Now, this all can be avoided very easy. Like any problem, solving this problem requires eleminating the root of the problem. Yes. /etc/fstab. But how do we have to eleminate it? Simply removing it isn't an option, since that would result in a kernel panic. So, you say, "Well it's simply impossible to eleminate /etc/fstab". Think again. Mac OS X is a good example of a Unix system that doesn't require /etc/fstab. Even better: /etc/fstab contains a single line: "# This file is present for backwards compatibility. It may be removed all together from future versions." This can become reality for Ubuntu too. How, do you say? Very simple actually. Somewhere in the early boot process, mount -a gets called. As we all know, this will mount everything in /etc/fstab. So remove that. Next we need something to replace it. A daemon that cooperates with hal, udev, ... to check for new devices. Or even merge hal and udev with this daemon. The daemon -- lets call it "mountd" -- will check for any new filesystems. It checks if it can mount it, if it can, it will do so, at a predefined location, such as /media/devname where devname is something like hda1, sdb3, ... This directory will be created if it doesn't exist. It also has to check if a filesystem hasn't been just unmounted by the user, so it won't remount it again. This can be done by patching umount to log the devices it has unmounted.
But how about special mount-points? How about homedirectories? Well, that's solvable, too. In the root of each partition which has to get mounted on a special location, a text file called ".mountpoint" will be created which contains the path where to mount that partition, e.g. /home. Mountd will check for such a file once a partition is mounted, next it will unmount that partition, and remount it on the proper location.

[....]

For us tech types, the terms 'mount' and 'unmount' make sense. Not so for average users. "Remove USB Drive" or "Remove USB device" would be easier for non-techies to understand.


From #6549 (merged):

For most of people reading this, "unmount volume" makes perfect sense, but for most "humans" using Ubuntu, Unmount volume isn't a clear action.

My GF had to call me because she didn't know how to remove her pen drive safely. (she said later she suspected it would be that "unmount volume", but she was unsure whether after clicking there, all her data would be deleted).

Other suggestions :
Disconnect drive (3)
Disconnect drive (umount) (2)
Prepare for removal (1)
Remove drive (1)