Application Idea Pool

[RastaMahata]

I just wanted to start this, let you know of some ideas I have, and know if you had some too.

Right now, I'm giving away copies of ubuntu to my friends, and found out that they dont get what they thought they would. So here goes some problems newbies have, and some possible solutions.

"Where are my hard drives?"
This is a common newbie problem, and I think that the "fdisk -l"+"edit /etc/fstab" solution isnt friendly enough. So why not fix it?
There could be some kind of application within gnome to manage hard drives. It could list all hard drives connected, and options for each one, like "Automatically mount at start up" and some other things. Or why not, have them all mounted automatically, and in the preferences of each device say if the hard drive should be mounted at start up or not.

"Why is everything brown? I want this thing to look different"
The user should easily be able to change the following things from a single place, without editing any weird option: wallpaper mouse pointer windows borders icon sets splash screen metacity themes.
Right now, there are tools (http://www.miketech.net/gnome-art/) that can simplify the work of searching for new themes and installing them, but all of the before mentioned items should still be customizable from a single application.
I already posted a backport thought about this.

What do you think about these ideas? What other apps should make it into the linux desktop?

[TravisNewman]

agreed on both parts :) Sorry, I know I don't add much here, but just wanted to say that yes, I do agree!

[tread]

I like the fdisk frontend idea, and as soon as I finish my thesis I'll try to write one. The only hitch is, thats two months away :)

[RastaMahata]

I like the fdisk frontend idea, and as soon as I finish my thesis I'll try to write one. The only hitch is, thats two months away :)
thank you :)

Any other ideas, anyone?

(yes, this is a bump)

[rubycon]

I have a couple of ideas:

I use btlaunchmanycurses.py in a screen session on my server so it can download and upload torrents all the time. I also specify a directory in which it should look for new torrents every minute. So whenever I want to add another torrent i just drop it there. To watch how my torrents are doing I have to log on the the server from a terminal and reattach the screen session and the status is shown in the terminal. My idea was to somehow set up a webinterface so I could just open firefox, type in my server's name in the adressbar and watch my torrents from there, updating every minute or so.

Next i have an idea for a wizard program with some standard xml type fileformat in which you can easily write wizards for things covered in ubuntuguide and the howto section. I think that would be nice for all beginners who don't like to use the terminal.