rahilm
April 5th, 2010, 07:19 PM
hii..
Ubuntu lucid is the first beta i am testing. since my hard drive is out of space, i installed it on one of my external usb hard drive. So far, it has been impressive.
Since now people are really serious about changing ubuntu rather than defend what it already has and glorifying its features, I thought I would bring up some ideas to some problems that i have faced. I don't know if many of you have faced these problems, neither do i know if any of these ideas are feasible. But i thought about mentioning some of them here since people are more polite in these parts of the forums. There are also problems which i have no solution.
1)The dependancy issue..
I debated with myself for a long time on this. I have been a windows user for a long time till i switched to ubuntu completely. There is one feature of windows which i find really useful. Double-click install. Talk about installing vlc on both windows and in ubuntu. There is an executable you download and then install it directly. In ubuntu you fire up USC and install with a single click which sounds great. There are actually more than a dozen files which are downloaded into a mysterious "/var/cache/apt/archives" directory.
What do you do if a computer does not have internet access. Or let's say, It doesn't have the drivers required to access the internet. What to do? In windows no problem, but in ubuntu it is. You even need the corresponding repositories to be activated if you want to install through '.deb's. Else there is brute force install.
I am not saying it is that bad. But how about making the gdebi scan the current directory to see if there are any dependencies that it requires. It makes installing a bit easier.
2) How about installing while downloading...
While beta testing, one thing i noticed is that there are almost 200mb updates every day. It takes over 1+1/2 hrs to download them so I don't do that everyday. But i used to use synaptic. A good thing about USC is that it installs different programs as different tasks. I realised it just now which makes this point a little outdated.
3) Too many kernels....
Although I do know how to remove them, the average user doesn't. How about making only two kernels to remain at the same time. While installing, the installer could check if there are more than two kernels installed and then remove the needful until only two remain. Even if that sounds crazy, how about asking to remove them for you. Loads of entries on bootup don't look nice.
[Computer Janitor is crazy... and unintelligent]
4) Running apt-get autoremove automatically after something is removed. Rather than expecting the user to fire up the computer janitor (which he won't.. it is very confusing) or opening the terminal and running it (he may even not know such command exists), how about doing it automatically. like after something is un-installed, a pop up asking permission to remove certain packages that are useless.
5) A problem that has been bugging me since i installed the beta on my externel drive is that whenever i update grub (as in.. the program) , the idiot installs grub to the mbr of the internal hard disk, which leads to an "error device not found" when i start my computer without the hard disk plugged in. I am considering replacing grub with burg.. but i wonder what will happen when I install a new kernel.
6)OK now this point is actually worthless.. its only a rant. about the new indicator icons. Some really wise men decided that they shall integrate the 'envelope', the 'volume' and 'rhythmbox' and ubuntu would look more efficient.... it doesn't.
7)This is actually more of a question i have been having. What's with the "Lock Screen".. what is the logic anyway. I read... It is there to prevent somebody else from using your session. and it really succeeds in it. But doesn't sleep mode work that way too? As i mentioned above that it takes 1.5 hrs to download an update. Since i have nothing to do, I take a stroll outside. Before that, i lock my screen so that my younger brother doesn't mess around with the updates. But he figured out a way to do that. Click Switch User. Click the power icon on bottom right. Click Shutdown, and boom.. the computer shuts down without a warning that other users are logged in.
SO much so far... will be back with more.
Ubuntu lucid is the first beta i am testing. since my hard drive is out of space, i installed it on one of my external usb hard drive. So far, it has been impressive.
Since now people are really serious about changing ubuntu rather than defend what it already has and glorifying its features, I thought I would bring up some ideas to some problems that i have faced. I don't know if many of you have faced these problems, neither do i know if any of these ideas are feasible. But i thought about mentioning some of them here since people are more polite in these parts of the forums. There are also problems which i have no solution.
1)The dependancy issue..
I debated with myself for a long time on this. I have been a windows user for a long time till i switched to ubuntu completely. There is one feature of windows which i find really useful. Double-click install. Talk about installing vlc on both windows and in ubuntu. There is an executable you download and then install it directly. In ubuntu you fire up USC and install with a single click which sounds great. There are actually more than a dozen files which are downloaded into a mysterious "/var/cache/apt/archives" directory.
What do you do if a computer does not have internet access. Or let's say, It doesn't have the drivers required to access the internet. What to do? In windows no problem, but in ubuntu it is. You even need the corresponding repositories to be activated if you want to install through '.deb's. Else there is brute force install.
I am not saying it is that bad. But how about making the gdebi scan the current directory to see if there are any dependencies that it requires. It makes installing a bit easier.
2) How about installing while downloading...
While beta testing, one thing i noticed is that there are almost 200mb updates every day. It takes over 1+1/2 hrs to download them so I don't do that everyday. But i used to use synaptic. A good thing about USC is that it installs different programs as different tasks. I realised it just now which makes this point a little outdated.
3) Too many kernels....
Although I do know how to remove them, the average user doesn't. How about making only two kernels to remain at the same time. While installing, the installer could check if there are more than two kernels installed and then remove the needful until only two remain. Even if that sounds crazy, how about asking to remove them for you. Loads of entries on bootup don't look nice.
[Computer Janitor is crazy... and unintelligent]
4) Running apt-get autoremove automatically after something is removed. Rather than expecting the user to fire up the computer janitor (which he won't.. it is very confusing) or opening the terminal and running it (he may even not know such command exists), how about doing it automatically. like after something is un-installed, a pop up asking permission to remove certain packages that are useless.
5) A problem that has been bugging me since i installed the beta on my externel drive is that whenever i update grub (as in.. the program) , the idiot installs grub to the mbr of the internal hard disk, which leads to an "error device not found" when i start my computer without the hard disk plugged in. I am considering replacing grub with burg.. but i wonder what will happen when I install a new kernel.
6)OK now this point is actually worthless.. its only a rant. about the new indicator icons. Some really wise men decided that they shall integrate the 'envelope', the 'volume' and 'rhythmbox' and ubuntu would look more efficient.... it doesn't.
7)This is actually more of a question i have been having. What's with the "Lock Screen".. what is the logic anyway. I read... It is there to prevent somebody else from using your session. and it really succeeds in it. But doesn't sleep mode work that way too? As i mentioned above that it takes 1.5 hrs to download an update. Since i have nothing to do, I take a stroll outside. Before that, i lock my screen so that my younger brother doesn't mess around with the updates. But he figured out a way to do that. Click Switch User. Click the power icon on bottom right. Click Shutdown, and boom.. the computer shuts down without a warning that other users are logged in.
SO much so far... will be back with more.