Manish's Tech Blog

As everyone might be knowing that Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope is heading towards release. It had lots of beautiful and useful improvements. Fixing bugs and adding features is not achieved by a Magic Wand. Developers toil hard to keep the quality of the release at the best possible level.

Since Jaunty Final release is scheduled in April 3rd week, there is hardly any time left for feature requests. Feature Freeze had taken place long back and after the final release, its Karmic Koala on which most of the developers would show their expertise.

Here goes my wishlist for the Karmic, some of them would sound strange or weird or even impossible. All criticisms are invited. Some of them have been inspired by Ubuntu Brainstorm

• Most of the people complain that Ubuntu is quite slow. They use it in a Live Environment and come to this conclusion. Since we don’t expect everyone to be geeks, the average user doesn’t know that running Ubuntu as a live session can sometimes be painfully slow. This leads to bad name and hurts too. “The solution to this problem is to tell the end user that using Ubuntu as Live can be slow. To harness the real power they need to install it. This can be in any form, as a dialog box or any other way which suits the developers”

• C programming is taught in most of the schools and colleges. Every teacher tells them that Linux has an excellent compiler built in called gcc. They go and try to compile their programs, and then “header file not found”. What’s the use of including gcc when glibc6-dev isn’t installed? This situation is even though when glibc6-dev package is in the CD. To counter-reply this fact, people claim that Ubuntu is for n00bs. Isn’t Ubuntu for all those college students in large numbers who too need C headers for the college work?

• Guess what bootloader is another thing which sometimes causes nightmares. We do need to modify the GRUB’s menu.lst file, finally screwing it up. If there do exists graphical frontends, then why not include them in default installation? QGRUBEditor is one such nice choice. Fedora too has a GRUB editor.

• Ubuntu boasts of excellent Bluetooth experience. I tried it and it does work. My friend too a pic of his laptop and tried to transfer it to my laptop. Guess what? No Incoming Bluetooth server installed. Why cant obexpushd package be pre-installed on the system?  As Onkar pointed out, its preinstalled on Intrepid.

• Put Screen Saver, Appearance and Screen Resolution under on submenu named Display to clear up the mess.

• Put Mouse, Keyboard, Keyboard Shortcuts, HPLIP Toolbox, Default Printer in a sub-menu named Hardware to further clear up the mess.

• We are still stuck up with CHM file formats which don’t open by default. A lot of eBooks are available as chm, so let there be one default CHM Viewer like xchm or gnochm

• Ubuntu’s Gnome theme looks horrible on small screens. It uses extremely high font size like 10 or 12. I reduced it to 8 and like the change. This should not be default. If the screen resolution is equal or less than 800×600, then reduce the dpi to less than 96 and the font size to 8. This would help some poor souls.

• Lastly, they can make the dust theme a default. If not dust theme, then any one of the other two new themes introduced in Jaunty Jackalope.

I ask pardon for any typos or grammatical mistake. It’s 6 in the morning and havnt slept