Initial ubuntu impressions and suggestions

[a-aa]

Adam Greenblatt wrote:

> 2) This time, X came up with 1024x768 at 24bpp as requested, but at only
> 60Hz.  Again, editing /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 was required to fix the  
> problem;
> something a novice wouldn't be comfortable with.  (In this case, the  
> monitor
> that I was using didn't support DDC, so it was using a generic default
> with a maximum horizontal refresh rate of 48kHz; hence the 60Hz limit at
> 1024x768.  Admittedly, most modern monitors support DDC, so this wouldn't
> be a problem for most users.  Perhaps if a DDC link is not detected, it
> could prompt the user for the info?  That's probably getting too 
> technical
> for your target audience, though...)

Not true anymore unfortunatly, linux ati drivers has a habbit of 
toasting the monitor DDC info, which means I have atleast 3 monitors 
here with no ddc info anymore.
As a solution a gui tool to alter it sometime in the future would be 
nice (maybe even a warning when running at 60hz?  A "do not display this 
again" warning considering my laptop monitor will always run at that ;) ).

> 2) I've never used Gnome before, and it has been quite a while since
> I've played with Debian.  But then, most Ubuntu users probably won't be
> familiar with these either: they'll be coming from a Windows or Mac
> background.  Perhaps there could be a "Getting started with Ubuntu"
> document readily viewable from the Applications menu?  It could give
> examples of how to:
>
>   Share files with Microsoft Windows users.
>   Join a Microsoft workgroup / domain
>   Access files on other Ubuntu machines.
>   Add a new user to this machine.
>   Setup a printer.
>   Install and upgrade software.
>   Add support for additional languages / keyboard layouts to this 
> machine.
>   Change the timezone when travelling
>   Play an .mp3 file
>   Watch a dvd
>   etc., etc.

I tested my ubuntu laptop with my father, he didn't care about sharing 
files (could be nice I suppose), but browsing the network was extreamly 
simple (simply select the network shortcut, he commented it was way more 
reliable than his windows box).
He was also able to play a dvd without problems (one thing there, when 
putting in a dvd with video, you might wanna consider starting 
totem/selected media player, instead of showing the files?).

> 4) Maybe some of the housekeeping tasks (like updating the locate
> database, etc.) that are currently handled by cron jobs could be run
> once in the background after the initial install is complete.  That way
> they'd be up to date and ready to go from the start.  The downside, of
> course, is that the machine would appear slow at first.

Personally I hate this, for example redhat runs prelink'ing in the 
background after you install something, and while prelinking is nice and 
all this means the computer runs dog slow for no apparent reason for a 
rookie.

> 5) I tried double-clicking on an .mp3 file in nautilus, and it started up
> totem, which in turn failed to play the song with an uninformative 
> message
> of the form: "Totem could not play 'file:///home/...file.mp'.  Failed to
> open; reason unknown."  It logs a more useful error message:
>
>   ** (totem:7012): WARNING **: don't know how to handle audio/mpeg,  
> mpegversion=(int)1, layer=(int)3
>
> elsewhere, but I didn't discover that until later.  This all works fine
> with a plain .wav file.  While I understand that licensing issues may
> prevent you from decoding mp3s in the default install, shouldn't it fail
> more gracefully?

It should also in my opinion run rhythmbox instead of totem ;)


Oh, and one thing, another error you might wanna remove, when shutting 
down using gdm stopping gdm fails, not surprisingly, as it's already 
off.  I've seen this on other distro's aswell and throwing an error 
there is just unneccesary ;).