Contributor tyler.szabo

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.

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I tried to install both 7.04 and 7.10 on an older pc, and found that the 'Forward' button in the installer was inaccessible. A scrollbar when necessary would be awesome!

It's great that clicking on the clock brings up a calendar - but why Evolution's calendar?

The majority of people use a webmail service, so having a calendar that can sync with major web calendars (eg Google Calendar, Windows Live Calendar), that is easy to add and remove events to, to add alarms and notifications and to be able to do all of this without opening an email application would be fantastic, I think.

Thanks for the oppurtunity to be heard.

It is very frustrating when you get caught out after 30 boots and the system does a full check. Especially if you are about to give a presentation or you just need to read one bit of information. The Ubuntu team have done a great job of speeding up the boot time but this irritation undoes all the good work.

Possible solutions and further explanation:
http://micrux.net/?p=52

When someone wants to unmount a volume and the mount point is used, he gets a message telling him that the volume can't be unmounted because an application uses it. The user has no idea which application is actually using it and can't remove the device.

I propose that the popup tells him which application(s) is(are) using the device and propose to terminate them (that list should be kept up to date when the app. dies).

Ubuntu's bootloader is a stark black and white screen, filled with confusing options. It gives newbies a moment of indecision, as they try to figure out if they are supposed to choose something, and wonder why there are three or four Ubuntus listed. Then the timer finishes counting down (starting from 10), and the newb begins to feel like he's getting in over his head as his PC boots into Ubuntu.

Too much information up front, stark text-only display, painfully long countdown timer. What would be the alternative? Well, when a Fedora PC is booted up, the first thing the user sees is a graphical splash screen, and "Booting into Fedora (kernel version) in 4 seconds ... " The user can press a key to interrupt and select from kernel versions or alternative operating systems, or just let it boot into Fedora.

Can't we create our own attractive bootloader? Or, failing that, copy-and-paste Fedora's?