Contributor xiota

It would be good to have greater control over samba shares, and make them only temporary, so that:

a) They stop sharing after the shared file is downloaded a certain amount of times (or a certain amount of files are uploaded)
b) A reboot happens.
c) A certain time they stop sharing.

One case you may want this is if you are at a LAN party, you may want people to be able to upload to your computer, however, after you leave the LAN party, you may not want them to do so anymore.

Or you are working on a project with mates at your house, and set up a share to share files, however, when you get to uni with your laptop, you no longer want that share to be accessible at all (or cheating bastards will get it).

Time based sharing could be easily implemented by a one-time cron script (designed to activate at the time the share stops sharing). The others may need changes to samba.

This functionality doesn't have to be in the core distro, however, it would be nice polish and pave the way for new types of sharing paradigms using samba.

It should be possible to limit some samba shares to specific IP's or MAC address only.

This would add an extra layer of protection, as we could then automatically prevent the samba port being open at all to people who shouldn't be able to access the shares.

An example where this might help is going is if someone does something dumb like connect an unprotected Wireless access point to the network (and yes, I have seen this done on a enterprise network before). Samba might contain a flaw that allows root access. However, if only 1 IP should be able to access the share anyway, you could possibly lock the ARP entry on the router (never did a CCNA, so not sure if you can bind it to a port too), and this would make a secure connection. Samba would also appear invisible to everyone else, so even if it had a security flaw, an outsider could not break it.

When you clear Gnome recent documents, many applications clear their recent documents but GIMP doesn't.
It would be great to integrate GIMP into Gnome and be able to clear GIMP Document history when clearing recent documents.
This way you wouldn't need to clear them separately.

Thanks

We should have the ability to restore backups of the xorg.conf and appropriate video card/monitor driver during the basic start up wizard when the current xorg.conf has invalid values. This is when the gui configuration wizard is shown. Currently I need to go into the terminal as root and copy an older xorg.conf over the current one, check what video card driver it uses and make sure that is there, then reboot. This is not user friendly.

I think there should be a simple way of restoring the configuration. If an end user accidentally set invalid values in the xorg.conf or because invalid values were set due to a bug in the application setting them, and just needed to restore back to a known good version easily.

The number of older configurations that can be stored up can be set to 5 for example or however many the end user wants to store. The end user can also delete old configurations if they so choose and backup the current configuration as well. This backup of the current configuration would also be done when restoring to an earlier version so that the user can go back to the one they switched from.

UPDATE: I realized that a quick search is being implemented in the next distribution. ( http://news.softpedia.com/images/extra/LINUX/large/ubuntu810alpha1-large_019.jp g ). Therefore the first problem I've mentioned below isn't a problem anymore. Only the second problem remains: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/13237/

There are two problems with Synaptic Search:

1. Search Speed

I have no idea why it takes so long to search! Saying that the package database is huge, is not a good enough excuse. take a look at how fast the 'locate' command works.

One solution is discussed in http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/9590/ I don't know if it's a good idea or not.

2. Search Result Ordering

And why does the results have to be sorted in alphabetical order?!? To find what I need, I have to go through a long list of useless programs.

I suggest the packages be sorted by popularity. (number of downloads.) Or at least for it to have an option where the user can specify the ordering policy.

UPDATE 2: some users suggested that the packages should be sorted by 'relevancy'. (Whatever that means)

After finally having a proper Linux set up with most issues out the way, I feel I and others would greatly benefit from a tool that shows diagnostics of the system and configuration and offers advice or links to other areas of the control panel which the user may not have thought of going to before.

The tool could:

- serve as a check list for things that are yet to be done or should be done, e.g. enabling any restricted drivers, restarting to enable certain software/settings, ...

- advise the user of conflicts, redundant files and packages, improper configurations etc.

- analyse hardware and recommend packages to make full use of the hardware

- analyse hardware and identify unsuitable hardware combinations, known issues with hardware (especially some NVIDIA graphics cards), etc.

- be an interface to documentation and support methods and resources, e.g. trouble shooting guides, wikis, forums, IRC, ...

Note: I didn't know what to put for "this idea is related to" and put Gnome in there. The idea is meant to be for all desktop environments.

Solid State Drives (SSD) are becoming more popular and less expensive all the time. Many people are using SSD drives either exclusively or in conjunction with hard drives.

Solid State Drives, unlike RAM or hard drives, do not have unlimited write cycles. That is, with repeated "disk" writes to the SSD (on the order of 100,000), the memory bits can wear out and fail to store data properly.

Therefore, it would be very useful if Ubuntu had an INSTALLATION OPTION that could setup a "Boot to ram" configuration (where the SSD is copied to system ram, then run from ram)

-OR-

The installation option could place heavily written but expendable directories into TMPFS or RAMDISK.

Also, internal system parameters such as the elevator, sync and cache flushing back to the SSD would need to be configured for optimal SSD use.

The goal, of course, being to minimize or eliminate write cycles to the Solid State Drive and maximize it's working life.

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Well, i think some of you may have some headache on loosing time about the our so beloved '~/Desktop' folder - the problem were some very creative coders started to translate the 'Desktop' into each language 'Desktop' translations.

Well, i confess, even being portuguese, i installed the english localization for avoiding such problems - and i think i were right on choosing english.

When i were explain to a friend of how copying or moving files to the Desktop from the Terminal, nothing appeared there - just guess why....

I even got more scared when i saw, for example, the Desktop folder in castillian spanish has accents and spaces - i got completelly shocked...

My suggestion is the Desktop folder being always named Desktop, and if some people likes folders with translated names with accents and spaces, please make a filesystem link of them...

I neither tried about how does localization works with menu key combinations, like ctrl+a, ctrl+s, ctrl+q, etc. - I remember for example, the ms-windows localized versions about menu key combinations are completelly messy.

When you search in nautilus, you have to right click + select properties, to view the files path. It would be very nice to have a column with paths, or a breadcrumb menu for the selected file. A feature with "open folder which contains the file" is also necessary.

While it seems to be so easy to create a Slax bootable pendrive from a .iso file, doing the same about an Ubuntu live-cd is a complete headache.

Would be interesting if were there easier ways to create a bootable pendrive from an Ubuntu .iso live-cd.

This would surelly make much more easier the process of installing Ubuntu into netbooks like Asus-EEEPC and Acer-AspireOne. (which information online about is painful as well)

I think also a .sh script or a gui-based tool would be very helpful for all the process, specially for newbies.

If someone has a Brainstorm idea page open, and then logs in, they are taken to a welcome page. Instead, they should be redirected back to the previously opened idea.

This is probably not super-critical in this day and age of monolithically-sized hard-drives on the cheap, but it does pertain to smaller units such as the EeePC, and perhaps older machines.

Synaptic and Apt-Get have a great feature whereby the tool estimates the download size and expected drive usage upon installation, however it doesn't compare that value against the actual free drive space on the system. It is perfectly possible to attempt to download 100MB worth of updates that will consume 200MB of disk space after installation (total 300MB) when you only have 50MB of actual disk space free.

A simple query of the drive and a message dialog advising that the downloads and/or installation cannot be completed due to lack of space would save many a new user from tearing their hair out when Apt-Get kicks up a stink about being unable to perform any other task (such as removing apps to make space) because it has an unfinished installation that needs to be sorted out first.

It doesn't make sense : "you are about to remove the group %name and all it's members from your buddy list, are you sure? " If the user emptied the group before, of course he is sure!

This doesn't happen very often, but it really shouldn't happen at all. Someone on the Ubuntu Forums removes herself (the only admin user on the system) from the admin group, so she can't sudo and has to reboot into recovery mode to add herself back to the admin group.

Even though, anything should be possible by manually editing the /etc/sudoers file or making other terminal-based changes, people should not through the GUI of Users and Groups be able to remove the last admin user from the admin group.

It is conventional when editing text that pressing the End key moves the cursor to the end of the current line and Ctrl-End moves to the end of the document.

When renaming files with long names (where the text of the filename has wrapped to several lines) this convention is not followed.

End jumps to the end of the filename rather than to the end of the current line of text. This frequently catches me out and I'd like to see it changed.

Make a guest account that people can login to, and check mail, surf web.

Every time the guest account logs out, its purged so next user who login is a clean fresh account.

Mac OS X has this;
* http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html#system

Hey, I know that some of you thinks that yes, why should Ubuntu copy other OS's when it can be unique.
And of course I think it should be too.
But face it, OSX (especially Leopard) has some really cool stuff, like the document preview functions and time machine.
Ubuntu already has/will have features like tracker, cheese (photo booth), and come one, spaces? Ubuntu and almost all other linux distros has had different workspaces for ages.

The reason why a lot of Windows users don't use Ubuntu is because they want the latest games and all that, and I can get that.
But really, OSX doesn't really have unique stuff like that, it's based on Unix, and most people use it because it looks amazing and has alot of cool features.

If Ubuntu would just focus a bit on the design, and try to be appealing to all the "trendy" people that use OSX too, you could get alot of users to Ubuntu.

Develop a opensource alternative for Adobe Flash the same way as Microsoft had developed Silverlight (http://silverlight.net).
And than promote it to Youtube and other websites that are using Adobe Flash at the moment.

When there is an alternative the Ubuntu users can have a media experience without a browser crash like Adobe Flash does.

I propose we take a stab at the embedded server market. The end result being that we have a server distribution in under 50 megabytes and capable of running on systems with under 64 megs of RAM.

It would be nice to have the system log color coordinated so if your looking for a problem its easier to find.