Contributor steve196

I think the 6 ttys available by default are an exageration for the common user who doesn´t use it, wasting memory resources.

Make a new application or improve Beagle, Tracker or Deskbar.

It do acronym lookups, math calculation, fact lookup, data generation, unit conversion, etc.

So that when I ask it something, it answers me.
RAM? = Random access memory
91*74-26 = 6708
Capital of Sweden? = Stockholm
22 inch in centimeter = 55.88 centimeter
chemical formula for water? = H2O
#0000ff = shows the color blue
01101000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111 = hello
68 65 6C 6C 6F = hello
Hello in Italian? = ciao
Time in Tokyo? = 19:46
Weather in Paris? = 7°C, sunny.
rot13 hello = uryyb

So right from the Deskbar (or something) on the desktop, I can ask something, and it will answer me.

Lack of standardised linux packaging is letting down Developers, end users, network administrators, everyone, because there's no standard means of dealing with it, and developers don't want to waste their time to release 5 different packages to accommodate every package type.

The time has come to organise a world wide conference, to design a new standard that is common between distro's. I suggest using the following process to take action:

During Transition period:
- Current Packaging formats are still used
- Standard database for tracking installed packages (makes it possible for other package management systems to interact with the database of the current packaging system)
- means of tracking currently installed files from each package (so that uninstallation can be done through other programs).

By the End of Transition:
Have a packaging format (or a few standard ones) which are used amongst all distro's, that covers all the features required of the various packaging systems. At this point of time, RPM, DEB, ebuild's, etc should be depreciated!


This is really the last major problem that faces linux. With packaging standardised, developers can finally easily release their products for any distro, and a significant amount of time is saved by every distro "reinventing the wheel", and actually getting down to business.

It would be great if Ubuntu (or other distributions as well) provide an easy to use remote desktop solution. While it's quite easy to connect to a remote X-Server (x over ssh or nx), it's rather hard to get also support for sound (from the remote desktop), printing (using your local printers on the remote desktop) and other things like "tray-icons" / "notification area" (have the Notification-Icons of remote applications in the local "notification area").

Update:
"x2go" looks pretty interesting: http://x2go.berlios.de/index-en.html
It uses the NX libs and they also provide a client for Windows. But I have not tested it (yet).

Ubiquity should set up encrypted swap, unless told not to. Because encrypted swap doesn't require inputting a password every boot, and it increases security against forensic investigation.

We have wine for running Windows .exe's on linux, so why not a layer for running Mac .dmg's? Now that Apple has started using Intel chips, there is no problem with our x86 processors. There are plenty of apps out there developed for MacOSX that us linux users have no hope of running. While it might break the 'purity' of linux, it would not be installed by default and would do no more dirtying than wine.


(Note: I know that Wine Is Not an Emulator, but the official definition was too long for the title)

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 don't know how...but can't you make installing applications easy like in windows with the .exe?It's really confusing if you keep it simple you will atract more ussers

Work with the NSA, or an university or hire some contractor to audit important core pieces of Ubuntu such as the GTK+ and Qt libraries, X.org, and GNOME for security, bugs, crashes, etc. Memory leaks, buffer overflows, stack overflows, infinite loops, etc.

This will improve the security, stability and reliability of the whole operating system.

Improving the stability of system libraries (such as GTK+ and Qt) will improve the stability of all applications in the system.

And X.org needs to be more stable too, it is known to behave bad under heavy load, get stuck into infinite loops, have keys get stuck, etc.

Archives are opening in applications like File Roller. Why? When you thing about you realize that archive is nothing less than special type of folder (and folder is special type of file with defined structure dependent on filesystem). But archives can be presented as compressed folders and opens in same windows as regular folders. Why do we need to confuse user with different windows?

Working with archives will be easy as in Midnight Commander or in Total Commander or in Windows XP. And if it will be implemented like VFS (zip://path/archive.zip/subdirectory/file) or as kernel driver it will be easier due to be transparent to any application.

Update: If gvfs is not possible, mounting the archive could be another possible way to implement this.

Archive managers should be used only for creating archives with non common attributes, e.g. encrypted, splitted to multiple volumes (to fit DVD, CD, ZIP drive, Floppy)...

Note: When you try to drag big file out from the archive from File Roller you need to wait to fully uncompress file before releasing mouse button (once it started to uncompress it). It's bad and very annoying.

(Idea copied from: http://chabada.sk/better-desktop/)

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

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.

Would it be possible for Ubuntu to run games with DirectX 10, something that Windows XP does NOT allow?

Would it be possible that games run on Ubuntu would run faster and smoother than in Windows XP? I am quite sure that half the users of Windows would migrate to Ubuntu.

Commercial games now require a great amount of people working together for years, I don't think that the variety of games available for other platforms would be possible for Ubuntu starting from scratch, it would be better to profit from all the existing games for Windows.

Hello,

I don't understand why 20 Go is required for the "/" when we want to use the partition editor at the installation of Hardy Heron...

I propose to fix the limit at 10 Go.

Recently on the ubuntu forums (and elsewhere) people have been posting bad commands to maliciously damage peoples systems. There should be a warning in the terminal (which could be swiched off in the terminal settings) when these commands are enterd before the command is executed. e.g.

tomatz@Desktop:/usr/bin#rm -r .[^.]*
Bash SECURITY WARNING Do you really want to enter this command? It could damage your system! (Y/N)
n
tomatz@Desktop:/usr/bin#

I really believe this should be implemented as this is obviously a security flaw. Most viruses in windows require user execution to infect the system which makes this security flaw not much different.

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.

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

[....]

There is nothing stopping us as users from deleting core system packages such as grub accidentally. I could tell any ubuntu user to do it, and they may wreck their system.

We should make APT smarter.
* There should be at least 1 kernel for instance, and it should be in the boot manager.
* If grub is the active bootmanager, make sure they know their system wont boot on deletion.
* You delete Xorg-X11, and you'll be hanging in prompt.

We need to make it more foolproof, and have a infrastructure in place to warn users if they are making a potentially fatal mistake.

Every second comment here is "well, it should be in apt". Well, if we want people to use apt for everything and be actively using it, we need to make it safer. I cant uninstall windows from their add/remove programs for instance now can I? Yet, one wrong click in adept will totally kill kubuntu.

Please note: THIS SHOULD BE ADDED AS AN OPTION! By default it should be enabled, except make it easily disabled so everyone wins

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.

I've installed Ubuntu for a number of friends and family. Whenever I go back to check on things a few months later, the desktop is littered with 'setup.exe' files, and I hear complaints that they "can't seem to install any programs!"

Of course, when I show them the "Add/Remove Programs" system, they happily download a zillion games and challenge me to Tux Racer contests.

When WINE is not installed, Ubuntu should have a default handler for Windows .exe files explaining that Windows software does not run on Ubuntu, and pointing them to Add/Remove Programs.

Perhaps something like "You have attempted to run PHOTOSHOP-SETUP.EXE, which is a Windows application. Ubuntu applications are available for installation from the Add/Remove Programs option in your Applications menu."

In addition, this feature could extract information about the EXE file and suggest equivalent Ubuntu applications. Most EXE files contain resources which indicate what they contain, as do most Installshield installers.

It would be pretty simple to have this system report names and md5sums of exe files being run to a web server, allowing Canonical to build a list of suggested alternatives for specific Windows applications.

This suggestion would certainly help eliminate confusion among new adopters, and would drive awareness of open source equivalents for Windows applications.