Contributor sebsauvage

For instance, if you plug in a USB device that is malfunctioning or not detected correctly, errors will be generated in the System Log, but nothing at all will happen in GNOME. Things like this should generate friendly graphical error balloons so that people at least recognize that something's gone wrong, instead of just thinking the device was not even recognized.

As braaivleis points out, it doesn't have to actually pop up the balloon; it can be like the updates icon that appears, but only shows a balloon when you click on it.

When you use quite often USB key, you always have to unmount them correctly to keep your data safe. When you're copying a file on a USB key, you must wait to empty the copy buffer.

I would propose to link the USB key icon to the state of the transfer :
- If there's a transfer, we can see clearly that we can not take the USB key away.
- When transfer is finished and the buffer emptied, the icon can show that the USB key can be safely removed

and thus it's not yet useful to click on "unmount", because the unmount management is totally transparent, and treated by the system. We can simply pick the USB key away because transfer is already finish and correctly closed. This will be a great innovation to simplify unmount such usual disks.

edit : Maybe the icon can stay like the same, but w can add some little sub-icon to inform of the state.

(see also ideas 1373 and 10032)

New major version of the popular Opera Browser is released today and is ready for download and install. Please update the version in the cannonical partners repository.

Source Download > http://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/linux/950/final/en/i386/

Since I don't think many people would be scared of an extra button to configure their selected screensaver, it would be really nice if it could be included (like it is in xscreensaver-settings).

Store the dpkg available and status files in an SQLite database to improve performance, reduce file size, increase integrity, have better flexibility when searching and simplify updates.

The proof of concept has already started.

http://people.debian.org/~seanius/dpkg-sqlite/

sean finney wrote:

I have checked it out, very nice, besides missing a -ldl flag, everything went
according to plan. The speed is simply amazing, here is a small benchmark I did
on my machine:

omega3:/home/joe/build/dpkg-sqlite# echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
omega3:/home/joe/build/dpkg-sqlite# time dpkg -S /usr/bin/gcc
gcc: /usr/bin/gcc

real 0m4.778s
user 0m0.252s
sys 0m0.152s
omega3:/home/joe/build/dpkg-sqlite# echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
omega3:/home/joe/build/dpkg-sqlite# time ./poc /usr/bin/gcc
querying as if listing package /usr/bin/gcc:
querying as if for owner of file /usr/bin/gcc:
gcc: /usr/bin/gcc

real 0m1.306s
user 0m0.240s
sys 0m0.096s
omega3:/home/joe/build/dpkg-sqlite#

[....]

In many environments computers are left unattended (e.g. schools, libraries, etc) and people can launch applications which mimic the look-and-feel of the login application (GDM) in order to get the users username and password.

This is called login spoofing.

Login spoofing can be prevented by using a secure attention key which is a key combination pressed before the user login to launch the password request dialog. This key can only be seen by the kernel, and not sniffed by any application.

Performing other tasks (even trivial ones) can be a bit of a pain while update manager (or any front-end for apt/dpkg) is unpacking/installing packages. I often leave it running, forget about it, and then start wondering why the system is so sluggish.

Could the update manger be set up to run with nice/ionice values that assign it a lower priority than the other programmes running on the computer?

currently, applications that use composite effects cannot be initialized without having compiz (or other composite rendering server) running.

please create a software based fall back for those applications, whether in X server extensions, or in the applications themselves.

Two problematic applications I know of are Elisa media center and avant window navigator - both fail to run without compiz.

Note:
Enlightenment DE and OsX (afaik) are software rendered.

I was not able to create a writeable share as my normal user, which is a problem in itself. To circumvent the problem, I create the share as the root. Now the folder is shared, but my user account does not know it. It does not show the icon on the folder saying that it is shared, nor does the sharing options menu say that it is shared. This is a potential security risk because you can create shares through root and the users would know nothing about them.
The user needs to know which folders are being shared.

Gnome (and lots of applications) keep a history of most recently used files and directories.
For example, Nautilus keeps track of most recent directories.

There is no simple way to cleanup all these tracks.

Ubuntu lacks a privacy-cleaning tool, like CCleaner under Windows (sorry).

If Ubuntu thats running on a Wubi disk is hibernated, the disk will corrupt.

Disabling the hibernation option is very easy, you gust have to:
Press Alt+F2 and type (without quotation marks) "gconf-editor"
In the left pane browse to apps > gnome-power-manager > general
In the right pane uncheck the "can_hibernate" and "can_suspend" options.
(Thanks for BlueSkyNIS for telling me how to do this)

If it's that easy to disable, then why can't Wubi do that automatically?

I like the idea of using applications that smoothly fit together and reuse libraries already loaded. Therefore, I'm trying to use mostly GTK+ applications when working in Gnome and mostly QT-based applications in KDE. When I'm searching for an additional application to install in the repository I'd like to have a swith to turn off applications building on one of these toolkits in order to ease the choice. Similarly, I would be interested to see the programming language used a bit more obvious since I'm a bit prejudiced and prefer c++ applications over python or perl-based applications.

Python, and OGRE...

...we have them both on Ubuntu, but we don't have pyogre: http://www.python-ogre.org/

Getting things like this packaged up would be great for game devs.

When an external NTFS hard disk is not cleanly unmounted because you unplugged it wildly on Windows, or because of a Windows crash, there is an error when you try to plug it on ubuntu, explaining what to do on the command line.

There should be an easy way to mount the volume anyway, by giving the choice to the user to mount it anyway, or not to mount it. A clear dialog box should do the trick.

I think there should be a LAMP meta-package providing installation and quick configuration for Apache, MySQL and PHP. After having installed the meta-package i should be able to have a running production environment, even if basically configured. This idea can surely be extended to a PAMP stack, with PostgreSQL, so there might be a PAMP meta-package too.

I know that you can skip this test in hardy but I still think the test is done way to often.

EXT3 is a good file system so I see no need to check the file system so often.

Users (for example Windows users) may think that Ubuntu has a bad file system you can't trust.

An option would be that the first time the file systems need checking tell the user WHY the system is checed and ask how important she think it is (like Never, Seldom, Often)

After reading that "Preload Drastically Boosts Linux Performance" I decided to give it a try and I was impressed. It really made a difference. So why not installing it by default and boosting the performance of Ubuntu right from the very beginning?

When I open the System Monitor the program itself needs ~13% of the CPU. This isn't bearable, especially if you think that the System Monitor is mostly used when a program hangs and produces 100% CPU workload or so.

The System Monitor shouldn't burden the CPU in any notable amount.

Some Gnome applets do not support transparency.
For example, the characters applet does not support transparency: http://sebsauvage.net/i/ubuntu/transparency.png

This breaks the overwall unified look & feel.

Sound Juicer is fine, but there's no reason to have 2 apps when one will do. Rhythmbox should be an all encompassing application for your music collection, which includes CD ripping. Most every other music manager application has this integrated and the main music application for Ubuntu should too.