Contributor qaaq

I'm not sure that "real" people use the Rhythmbox rating system which allow to give a notation between 1 to 5 !

Instead of it i suggest to have a much simpler system : a starring system (just fill a star in front of your favorite music see gmail for an illustration http://spaceagewasteland.com/images/gmail9.gif )

Brainstorm is a good occasion for a poll around that idea

see also http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=497755

Some computers make alot of noise whith their fans to keep them cool. Almost every computer has temperature and fan speed sensors.

The idea is to control the cpu scaling factor or the amount of cpu time in order to make it cool enough so that the fans don't speed up and there is no fan noise.

There is already a priority mode to preserve the battery charge. Why not another mode to preserve silence?

Dell seems to be ignoring this in Ideastorm.
http://www.ideastorm.com/article/show/62549/coreboot_formerly_LinuxBIOS_instead _of_proprietary_BIOS

Maybe Canonical could bring it up at their next meeting or something.

Benefits:
# 100% Free Software (GPL), no royalties, no license fees!
# Fast boot times (3 seconds from power-on to Linux console)
# Runs in 32-Bit protected mode almost from the start

Coreboot link:
http://www.coreboot.org/Welcome_to_coreboot

Launchpad needs a Wiki unrelated to Ubuntu. When we opened our open source project (ubuntu related, in a way) i was uncertain about being allowed to use Ubuntu wiki to fill one (1) page about the project.

I really think you should provide a wiki to every project in launchpad (maybe with the chance to choose to have an external one).

The rationale is:
- having an own wiki requires hosting. Why use launchpad for bugtracking and buying hosting space just for the wiki ?
- Ubuntu wiki is inherently unrelated for many of the projects.
- Launchpad's blueprints require an external site. This shouldn't be necessary

When a USB stick (or some other kind of data storage) is pulled out, while something is written on it or while part of the data is still cached in the RAM, freeze all file operations to the device and demand it to be plugged in again. After it is plugged in again, complete the remaining operations and unmount the device.
If the warning dialogue is canceled by the user, then cancel all operations and regard the device as unmounted.

edit: Thanks to Auzy for finding the very good description of this in http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/1515/ which was lost due to being incorrectly marked as a duplicate of something completely different.

When I use "Add/remove program", I often want to see more information than what is displayed a this time.

I will be great if more informations about the program we're looking can be displayed in the bottom frame.

These informations can stored in an online database, which contains the latest informations about the program.

For example, when we click on one program in "Add/remove program", we can see some extra info coming from the web :

- Brief Description of the program (already exists)
- Link to the developer's website
- Big button "Install this program (queue)"
- Rating (already exists)
- Latest available version of the program
- What's new in this version (multi-language)
- link "post a bug" relative to this program (launchpad or mail to developer's mailbox)
- post an idea relative to this program (brainstorm)
- Gallery of screenshots (to be discussed)

These informations could be grabbed from a wiki which represents the perfect non-technical documentation that all newbie could read first.

ps : this was already discussed in the comments of idea brainstorm n°9685 ( http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/9685/ )

pps : For those who knows the iphone, it's similar to the "more info" tab when you install a program. It's only grabbing texts and screenshots from the developer's page.

[....]

Evolution is so horrible that I don't have words to describe just how much I don't like it. Thunderbird, quite frankly, doesn't cut it either.

Ubuntu needs to find a PIM that is MODULAR. I hate evolution because I never used the notes or tasks features, didn't like the way the calendar worked, and hated waiting for it to load all those extra features every time I wanted to read an e-mail. Thunderbird's address book doesn't do everything I need it to do, but there's no way of switching it with a different address book.

We need a lightweight, fast, diverse and simple e-mail application integrated into the system. We also need a lightweight, fast, diverse and simple contacts management application integrated into the system. Those should NOT be the same application.

KOrganizer has the right idea, but we can't get KDE and GNOME mixed up in a default setup. Too many libraries, too many resources, way too slow.

When I plug in my old Motorola Razr phone, Ubuntu recognizes it as a music device and opens Rhythmbox. I'm able to drag and drop music onto the phone.

Unfortunately, my phone only has 256MB of storage, and I keep my music library in the FLAC format. Each song is about 30MB in size, and my phone doesn't understand FLAC.

Because of this, I have to re-encode my music into lower-bitrate MP3 files, then copy those files manually onto the phone - instead of using the convenient drag and drop interface.

Rhythmbox should know about 'supported' audio formats for devices it recognizes, and automatically re-encode music on the fly when copying to those devices. If device storage is limited, music should be re-encoded at a lower bitrate to save space.

This kind of thing should probably happen for video and pictures as well. Maybe adding this behaviour to Conduit is the answer.

I'm looking at Edubuntu and don't really see purpose for it. I'd rather see an option during installation of K/Ubuntu to install Edu applications.
I have two reasons for this suggestion:
1) The localization for some reason doesn't work properly for Edubuntu. Applications that are already translated in Ubuntu are not translated in Edubuntu. Half localization is good for nothing.
2) The childlish interface of Edubuntu is almost offense to 13 years old geeks. We have such in our community. I'd rather vote for an option to change the interface in Ubuntu although I don't really see need for childlish interface.

Sometimes, specially in low-end machines, the user might run out of swap space when performing any kind of heavyweight task (maybe he messed up when he created the swap partition). Currently, Ubuntu doesn't even notice it has run out of swap: it doesn't notify the user nor tries to fix the problem.

The idea would be to create an additional swapfile (even Windows 95 did this) and if there's no room for it, then notify the user about the problem and offer him a list of idle apps he might want to clsoe to regain some RAM/swap.

If a user tries to open a .txt file created in Windows, it will always ask them whether to open or run it.

I understand why, and I know it's just a setting in Nautilus Preferences (under Behavior), but it's enough to annoy new users and make the user experience less smooth and intuitive.

Maybe only unknown (or commonly executable) file extensions should prompt - and just open/view files with extensions like TXT and RTF.

Provide Network wide package management "landscape" free for all user

Seriously. It's getting silly now.

A point (pt) is defined as 1/72th of an inch. System fonts in Ubuntu are scaled by points and are 10pt by default, which means that you'd expect them to be 10/72th of an inch on any monitor.

However, Ubuntu (or specifically, Gnome) doesn't automatically decide the correct amount of pixels that are needed for an inch on a particular monitor. (I hear Xorg does detect it.) By default, the DPI (dots per inch) is set to 96.

That means that for my particular monitor (a widescreen 17" with a resolution of 1920x1200 pixels), texts get really really small. I have to change the DPI manually to 119.

But that doesn't solve all problems. OpenOffice's Impress (presentation application) also uses points for fonts. That's really bad. On your screen, a slide with a 72pt title might look okay (that would make it 1 inch high), but imagine the same slide on your beamer. A line of one inch isn't going to be very readable by the audience. Even with smaller DPI discrepancies you'll still get the problem of having a slightly different layout. Text might fall off the slide, or not fit on one line, etc. So, OpenOffice should, at least for presentations, use font sizes relative to the size of the slide. Percentages for example. For print it's nice to know the physical size, so Writer should probably keep the pt-based font scaling.

Another issue is web browsing. With such a high resolution, browsing becomes a problem. Sites usually use pixel-based scaling. That makes them way too small. Firefox should have an option to zoom to 120% by default. And to 80% for low resolution monitors. A slight additional annoyance is the ugly scaling of images by Firefox 3. Preserving the layout is a great feature, but it should also preserve image quality by using a good scaling filter.

So in short:
* Automatically detect and set the correct DPI for each connected monitor.
* Don't mix absolute and relative scaling for presentations, and other apps that usually need to preserve the exact layout.
* Provide a way to zoom in by default for certain apps for which the content gets way too small at higher resolutions.

[....]

Seriously, xsane terrifies me. I'm completely lost each time I use it. It reeks of that poorly designed early-90's hacker-app feel. There's Scanner Utility in Add/Remove, but it doesn't let me scan all of my scanner. Can we please have something similar to the scanning programs of Windows?

Push MSI to sell MSI Wind with preinstalled Netbook Remix.

The Ubuntu startup and shutdown splashscreens with the Ubuntu logo and a progress bar underneath it really looks like something from the 90ies (Windows 95 anyone?)

I don't know if there are any hindrances to using images or animations of higher resolutions than what is currently used (for machines that supports it), but I really think Ubuntu can do better here.

This may be an unimportant improvement compared to many other ideas here, but it should be a very quick and easy fix, and it will really help when you try to convince regular folks to make the switch (a graphically stunning desktop is _so_ important when you show it to occasional users!).

* Automatic erasing of duplicate lines in sorces.list
* Automatic deactivating of long-term unavailable repositories in sources.list (e.g. after 7 days)

Play application and system sounds with the volume and timing relative to where the sound is coming from. Yes like in games.

Suppose I'm running Compiz with three virtual desktops side by side and the middle desktop is in focus. On the right virtual desktop, Pidgin is running and generates a sound. It would be nice if the sound would seem to come from the right side.

We could take this further by muffling sounds coming from minimized applications or have compiz generate a cool wave effect (similar to the rain) that would come from the generating window - not too much, subtle but enough to provide a clue to where the sounds are coming from.

A simple easy to use GUI to configure a PAN network so that i can get to use my pc's internet on my phone after connecting them via bluetooth!!!

Thoughts?