Brilliant Brainstorms is a weekly-ish summary of some of the best brainstorms from the Ubuntu Brainstorm site. In the beginning it may not always come exactly once a week or on the same day, but, if it becomes popular, it should become more regular.

Last week I mentioned that there was a new Brainstorm blog to enable better transparency between developers and users. Now we have seen the first real post on that blog. The post covers some recent ideas and suggestions and what the Brainstorm team intends to do about them as well as discussing how to enable other projects to create a Brainstorm-like site. I think the more open-source projects use a Brainstorm-like site the better. It enables the developers to communicate directly with users and there is clearly a need for it, since it is very common to see suggestions on Brainstorm that are really for other open-source projects, not Ubuntu.

As you can tell, I am very happy with how the blog is going so far and I like what Brainstorm is doing. I would still like to see more discussion on the blog about how Ubuntu, not Ubuntu Brainstorm, developers are reacting to the ideas.

Now on to this weeks ideas:

Anyone who frequently reads Brilliant Brainstorms or who watches the Brainstorm site will know that this is not the first of this type of idea, still it is worth bringing up, since it is a great idea. Basically, the idea is that there are lots of people who would be happy to help Ubuntu out, but are not sure how to get started developing. With a site to explain how to get started and what you need to know, more people would, hopefully, join the development team.

Again, this is an idea we have seen before, but it keeps  coming back. Backups are very important, since most people now keep their precious memories as well as their work on their hard drive, and so Ubuntu should have a good built in backup utility.

As new users transition to Ubuntu, they may want to be able to boot into Windows when they need to. To make this even easier, it is a great idea to have a GUI utility to let users configure what OSs are in their GRUB menu and which one is the default. This may not be something new users will use a lot, at least not without help, but it should be there in case it is needed.

If you especially like any of these ideas, click on the image at the left and vote for it!

Brilliant Brainstorms will be a weekly-ish summary of some of the best brainstorms from the Ubuntu Brainstorm site. In the beginning it may not always come exactly once a week or on the same day, but, if it becomes popular, it should become more regular.

With the increasing popularity of free web mail, more and more people are bound to be looking for a way to get their web mail on their computer. If you look at my tutorial on using GMail with Evolution, you can tell just how difficult it would be for a new user to figure out how to get their web mail on their PC. If GMail, Yahoo Mail, Live Mail, etc. were an option in Evolution (the GNOME default email program,) it would make it so much easier for new users.

The idea behind Ubuntu Brainstorm is to get ideas and suggestions from Ubuntu users, but in order to expect feedback from users, developers must show how they are using that feedback. Both of these ideas provide methods for users to see what is going on behind the scenes, without having to look at the source code :-).

Although the example files could be much worse, they could also be much better. Showing off impressive formatting in office files and high-quality videos promoting Ubuntu (there are plenty user made Ubuntu ads) could make a good impression on a new user.

Although the reliability of SMART seems to be in question, as far as I am concerned, any chance of warning a user before a crash should not be ignored.

This is almost more of a bug-fix than an idea, but currently when you put in a disk that was not removed properly you get a big scary error message that directs you to execute a command in the terminal. Come on. Windows users often don’t bother to unmount their drives at all, they just pull.

Although Ubuntu Hardy Heron is still not expected for around two more months, Mark Shuttleworth has already announced the name and the basic goals of the version of Ubuntu after Hardy - Intrepid Ibex. The goals outlined so far are very broad and it will still be a long time before a full feature list will be worked out, but it is still interesting to get an idea of where Intrepid Ibex will be going.

The main focus of the announcement was on enabling better support for internet access wherever you are through “a variety of wireless technologies.” Here is a quote from the announcement:

“A particular focus for us will be pervasive internet access, the
ability to tap into bandwidth whenever and wherever you happen to
be. No longer will you need to be a tethered, domesticated animal -
you’ll be able to roam (and goats do roam!) the wild lands and
access the web through a variety of wireless technologies. We want
you to be able to move from the office, to the train, and home,
staying connected all the way.”

As the world is clearly moving in the direction of wireless internet (WiFi, 3G, WiMAX, whatever), it is good to see that Ubuntu will move in that direction too, particularly since connecting wirelessly with Ubuntu (and Linux in general) can be frustrating. This may also help Ubuntu play a bigger role in ultra-mobile devices, which is important since the market for these seems to be rapidly expanding.

Note: I am away right now, so I cannot cover the daily news, but I want to continue daily content on this site. This article was written in advance and published automatically. Daily news will resume in a few days, or sooner, if I am able to get online while I am away.

Dream Linux is a Debian-based CD distribution currently offering easy remasters, an unusual (and very good) installer, a dock, and more. In the upcoming version, Dream Linux 3.0, the distro has been rewritten to eliminate ties to pieces of other distributions and be a purely Debian-based distribution. The more noticeable changes include the awn dock replacing the Engage dock (on computers that can support it), the choice between GNOME or Xfce, and improved support for wireless cards.

For those who like to run lots of distributions on their computers, Dream Linux’s installer might be their favorite feature. The installer presents all of the settings on a single page, so you can see what you are doing before you click install. (The partitioner is not very good yet, but hopefully this will be improved before 3.0 final comes out.) Even better, not only can you put the bootloader in the Dream Linux partition, you can even have the installer add an entry for Dream Linux in your existing bootloader.

If you want to make your own distribution, Dream Linux includes a GUI tool to make simple changes to Dream Linux and burn it back onto a CD. Although this can be done fairly easily with other distros as well, you might as well give this one a try and see if you like it more.

Since Dream Linux has just been rewritten, there may not be any huge changes in this upcoming release, but Dream Linux still has plenty to offer.

In a recent interview with Linus Torvalds, he said that the desktop in general is getting to a point of maturity and that at this point, further innovation is not necessary, and therefore people should focus on small improvements to what we already have. To state it bluntly, the desktop is good enough, there is no need for major innovation.

While this sounds crazy at first, he has a point. Right now, most people view the desktop as whatever their desktop looks like right now. When they move to a new operating system that is different, they view that as bad, so there is a real argument that simply polishing the current desktop is the best thing to do. On the other hand, we could have said the same thing before GUIs existed. Most of us (yeah, yeah, I know there are people that still use the terminal for everything) think the GUI is a huge improvement, so what is to say something like that transition cannot be done again?

This issue is a very difficult issue to take a side on. On one hand, the desktop works now and it is very hard to identify specific shortcomings of it, so why change? On the other hand, it seems like an oppertunity to make something that could revolutionize computing is too big an opportunity to just ignore. So what is the right answer? I don’t know, but, luckily, with open-source, it does not matter. Some people will go to work making small improvements to what will happen and others will go to work on a whole new idea for what the desktop is. Proprietary companies will be forced to choose one path or the other and if they choose wrong, they will die, but open-source does not have that problem. Whatever is the right answer, if there is a right answer, open-source will have choosen that path, because open-source never has to take a single path.

Often when a new distribution of piece of software comes out in the Linux community, the feature list looks something like this:

• Updated package blablabla to 1.4.00.10
• Fixed bug in <name of other package>
• Added support for random hardware x through qjidjf 2.3.00.1

Ok, its not quite that bad, but it could be a lot better. If Linux is going to attract general users, it needs to start advertising the “cool” features, not the under-the-hood tweaks.

KDE 4 did this really well. The release announcement, while also talking about some developer-oriented features, is mostly about the over-the-hood changes, the changes the users care about.

Although it seems like a small thing, advertising features that users care about is an important step to spreading open-source software and Linux.

It appears that Canonical and the Kubuntu team have decided that, due to the delayed release of KDE 4, the upcoming release of Kubuntu, 8.04, will not be a long term support (LTS) release, as it would usually be. Periodically, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and other Ubuntu variants maintained by Canonical release a LTS release, which means that the release will be supported for 3 years on the desktop and 5 years on the server. Because KDE 4 will be released shortly before Kubuntu 8.04 is released, Kubuntu and Canonical are not comfortable giving the LTS tag to a release that incorporates KDE 4 this soon after its release. On the other hand, considering the amount of excitement around KDE 4, it seems like a mistake to not include KDE 4. The current solution, according to this announcement on the KDE mailing list, is to release two versions of Kubuntu 8.04, one with KDE 3.5 and the other with KDE 4. Apparently, neither will have the LTS release, though. Although this break from the standard schedule may cause some problems, considering the situation, I think the Kubuntu development team made the right choice.

While Linux’s ability to run on minimal hardware has already proven itself to be a major advantage over Microsoft Windows and other operating systems, a recent Lifehacker article that shows how to make your Linux system faster points out that even Linux is not immune to becoming bloated and slow. Although many of the tips shown in the the Lifehacker article are distribution specific and are almost all are minor changes, the article shows that it is important that users and developers are careful that unnecessary slowdowns and resource-eaters are removed before they become too tied in with the system. Although Linux distributions may not yet have encountered the bloat problems that plague Windows, in large part due to the excellent work of many developers, as Linux is adopted more and more is will become even more critical that developers and users watch for bloat and get rid of it as soon as possible.

The KDE team has announced the release of KDE 4 RC 2, codenamed “Coenig.” According to the announcement, RC 2 is now feature complete and all that remains to be done are a few bug fixes, finishing up the artwork, and some user experience stuff. I have not yet tried it my self, although I plan to soon, so I cannot give any opinion. The current expected release date for the final KDE 4 is January 11th.

Canonical, Ubuntu’s sponsor company, recently added a new feature to Launchpad, the website that manages all the code and collaboration for Ubuntu and other projects, called the Personal Package Archive (PPA), according to Softpedia. The PPA enables individual (or groups of) developers to upload and collaborate on new packages or modified versions of existing packages without the need to formally join the Ubuntu project as a developer. The goal is for this to provide a way for anyone with good ideas and some development skill to receive feedback and contribute their ideas to the Ubuntu project without committing to becoming an Ubuntu developer.

Further Reading: PPA Quick Start (Launchpad Documentation)