Contributor steve196

In the same way you're putting Firefox 3.0 Beta 5, you should integrate Open Office 3.0 Beta instead of the current version. I've tested it. It's stable and has many cool extra features.

Advanced power management currently cycles the hard drive once every few seconds even during activity on most laptops. This severely shortens the life of hard drives.

Many users want to install all available updates. The current update process, however, is unnecessary complicated. I recommend changing update manager as follows:

When the update notification icon is clicked, an admin password entry dialog (using PolicyKit) with 3 buttons should appear: "Install all updates" (selected by default), "Select updates", "Cancel".

"Install all updates" silently (minimized to tray) installs all updates. (and silently notifies via tray when finished)

"Select updates" shows the current updater dialog. There should be an option to ignore this and all further updates for a package.

I know that there is an "Install all updates" entry in the context menu, but it is well hidden and not the default.

Add 64-bit support to Wine.

Wine currently only supports 32-bit applications.

While it is common for modern machines to have at least a GiB of memory, older machines (2-3 years old) are (or IMO should be) a major target audience for Ubuntu.

Unfortunately, having 256MB of memory makes the machine almost entirely unusable for more than one task at a time.

Even the "minimalist" xubuntu is barely usable with this amount of memory.

I think Ubuntu should do some work on reducing memory usage to this level, at least for the xubuntu variant.

Support a standard distribution neutral installation format. AutoPackage is a good choice for this I think. But I don’t like the idea of it being all in one file. Otherwise you’ll have a huge installation file for programs like photoshop and various games if they are ported over to linux. And once you give an easy way for software authors to install their commercial software into Ubuntu, or any linux version that supports this format, that is great then. I’m sorry for those who will say to just put it up on a repository, but that will not work for these kinds of programs. How can you possibly include every single program from every software author out there? You can’t. Plus these are usually customized for the distribution the repository is supposed to be for. And then at that point you’re just rebuilding the wheel. Why waste all that time? Plus you are trying to make Ubuntu into an embedded system, and embedded systems have their limits like this very point. Now this is not a replacement for apt-get, but is a complement for it I think. Apt-get will be used to install software available on the repository and for updating system files like the kernel. But AutoPackage can support software that isn’t on the repository.

Use case: A person, let's call him Ethan, has Fedora, Ubuntu Hardy, and Ubuntu Intrepid installed on a new Dell laptop.
He confuses his swap partitions. He keep losing his hibernated sessions which he sometimes entrusts with unsaved data, and he doesn't really understand why.

Data specific to one operating system should not be stored in a swap partition when said operating system is not active. A swap partition may be best for use as swap space, but when a system is hibernated, that information needs to be stored in a file within the root partition of the operating system instance that is hibernating.

Only one swap partition should be needed on a multi-boot system.

title basically. We need to add this support. Apple already has it (but they sued or something) but we should still get it because lots of people are switching to Office Open XML (darn ms for using a name like ours for their cruddy formats) and we need to be able to use that or some people will not consider ubuntu as ahead in technology- they will consider it behind because of some silly office format.

USA have trade sanctions (Trade Sanctions Reform and Enhancement Act) which forbids the trade with Cuba.

Cuba does not like USA, so its probably not very found of Microsoft either. And with the trade sanctions I guess it can be difficult to get Windows to Cuba.

Market Ubuntu to Cuba. They loose dependency on USA, and Ubuntu's userbase grow. It's a win/win situation.

Proprietary software for their IT industry from a foreign nation which they have bad relations with could be bad for their national security.

Cuba is communistic. They like to share, and so do we.

The RAM disk at /dev/shm is a very useful device, especially for temporarily extracting archives to (remember the Amiga days?). The convenience of automatic deletion of temporary data like that at reboot cannot be understated.

Currently few new users are aware of it. A link to /dev/shm should be added by default to the Places menu and perhaps an option somewhere to display it as a volume icon on the desktop would be good too, rather than have to manually create a launcher for it, though the latter is not really a big deal.

Remove Mono and dependent applications from default Ubuntu Desktop CD. Mono occupies a significant amount of the valuable space on the live cd that could be used for translations and other things. Applications using mono use much more memory than their non-mono counterparts. Functionality can be provided by other applications that are just as good.

This will NOT remove Mono or any of the applications from the Ubuntu repositories, just the default Desktop CD. (Although removing them from the CD may mean they don't need to be in Main anymore)

This affects two applications included by default: tomboy and f-spot. Tomboy can be replaced by either sticky notes or zim and f-spot by gthumb.

Actually that is the feature that I'm missing more in Ubuntu. To be able to preview the content of the documents is very usefull for those who use OpenOffice.org.

Although not officially a standard, it has been common practice by most distributions that the /bin/sh link points to /bin/bash.

Ubuntu broke this common practice and links /bin/sh to dash.

This breaks A LOT of 3rd party apps, and causes A LOT of unneccessary trouble and support incidents.

If Ubuntu wants to promote dash, it should change all shell scripts to include a dash shebang. But it should NOT mess with the default /bin/sh link.

DON'T say "it's the script writer's fault when he uses /bin/sh and requires bash". We all know that. Nevertheless, a serious distro should not mess around with things that have become common practice even if wrongly so.

The end result of the current situation is that many things mysteriously work "everywhere but on Ubuntu".

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dash/+bug/61463
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dash/+bug/71887
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dash/+bug/141481

Examples of bugs caused by this:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dash/+bug/92189

[....]

I can't add this to the bug report as it's technically not a bug. When you try to upload a file to a website that is expecting certain files such as JPG's and other images, a user will be unable to upload images if their file extensions case is different.

My wife actually stumbled on this, so here's an example based on her issue.

First step: create 4 files on the desktop:
test1.JPG
test2.jpG
test3.Jpg
test4.jpg

Now go to MySpace and log in /* you know you have an account ;) */

Now, click Add/Edit Photos, then click Upload Photos. You should be looking at a file upload app, currently titled Photo Upload - 1.3. Click Browse and browse to the Desktop. The dialog box lets you select *.jpg, *.jpeg, *.png, *.bmp, etc, etc, etc. If you navigate to the desktop you will see the only file you are able to select is test4.jpg.

Of course I knew why this happens but being that Ubuntu is Linux For Human Beings, the average joe computer user demographic that Ubuntu is targeting won't figure this out right away. And to top it off, most digital cameras create capital file extensions automatically (ie, DSC0001.JPG), and this happens with any site that limits uploads to certain file extensions, not just MySpace.

Before the dialog box lists the available files to upload based on the predefined file extensions, it should conduct the initial search for those files as case insensitive. This way, even though the list of files is limited to *.jpg, a user should still be able to see test1.JPG, test2.jpG, test3.Jpg, test4.jpg all in his/her list of files to choose from.

./neco

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)

Please create and Ubuntu Service Pack (SP1, SP2, etc) like MS Windows.

If the user have to install Ubuntu, and there are a lot of updates, it will be easier to download an Ubuntu Service Pack (SP) with all the new updates, fixed bugs, etc.

Also it is very helpful for an IT team when they have to install or reinstall Ubuntu into several machines.

Regards

Felix

or react to the power button with a shutdown.

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.

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.

[....]

Step 1: Choose a day, significant to Linux.
Step 2: Get as many Distributions to write official announcements about it.
Step 3: Parade in major Linux City. Distros get there own floats . To get mainstream news.

Online Events: Start an internet wide campaign, to include "About Linux" links at the bottom of websites.
example:

http://i118.photobucket.com/albums/o112/scrag_10/FireUbu-1.jpg

There was a National News Broadcast in Canada about Fire Fox and that people were doing the work for free, and it's "Open Source," I think Linux should get the same treatment.

Other options instead of Linux/Ubuntu: Open Source day etc.