Problems and suggestions to make Ubuntu more newby-friendly

[S.P. van Noort]

Dear Ubuntu-list,

A friend of mine has recently installed Ubuntu on his laptop. Before
this he has tried Debian, but that was a little too complicated for
him, especially since it often required manually tweaking config files 
for tasks like hardware recognition. After that he tried Suse, with
which he was much happier, since it recognized more and had a lot more
graphical utilities to configure things. Some things were not so easy
however, like getting DVD to play, upgrading programs. Since I am
running Debian and recently switched to Ubuntu, it was harder for me to
help him with Suse. Recently he installed Ubuntu, there were however a
few problems.

In this (long) mail, I have tried to organize his problems and give some
suggestions of my own. Please tell me which problems would require a
bug report, which are solved in Hoary or are already work in progress
on which I am totally wrong, for which you have better suggestions and
where I should stop whining and start working.

1. USABILITY PROBLEMS
(a) Although a good goal is to have to never edit a configuration file,
sometimes it's necessary to edit one as root (/etc/fstab for example). 
It would be nice if this could be done graphically. For example, when
right-clicking on a text-file, that there is an option "Open this file
with super-user permissions". Now you have to type manually something
like "sudo gedit /etc/fstab".

(b) When a new user is added, no sudo-permissions are given to him. You
only can add him to certain groups. To give this new user
sudo-permissions, a user have to be exposed to "visudo". A user not
familiar with vi will not survive this experience.

(c) To install non-free/patent-encumbered media-playing software one has
to manually look them up in the wiki, and then install all these
programs one by one. Since almost every home-user wants at least some of
these installed, this should be easier. I would suggest a simple
(php-)script (which does not make it wiki-friendly) or a client-side
python program, in which you could simply select some things like: 
  [x]flash [x]java [x]dvd movies [x]mp3 [x]Microsoft movies
After that, a file is generated where the options are "translated" into
the real packages like libdvdcss2 and gstreamer-mad. This file can then
be  loaded into synaptic (file -> read markings) and after clicking
"apply" all these software will be downloaded and installed. The issue
of having the right repositories enabled should however still be
handled.

(d) Installing individual packages (deb or rpm)
To install a single Debian or rpm package file, one has to use a
terminal to do "fakeroot alien package.rpm" if it is a rpm-package, and
after that a "sudo dpkg -i package.deb". Most of the time this fails
because of dependencies. Which I normally solve by "sudo apt-get -f
install".
This is rather dirty, and a simple GUI program to handle this would be
nice. A double click on a Debian or rpm package, the obligatory warning
that your installing unknown software which could damage your system,
your password and everything is done would be nice, or some option in
Synaptic to "Install program from file".

(e) He has an external USB hard disk. When he wants to unplug it, he has
to manually unmount all the partitions (with nautilus), there is no
option to unmount all the partitions of a particular hard disk in one
step.

(f) When partitions of this disk are mounted, a lot of times it is not
possible to unmount them because they are "busy". Open Nautilus windows
sometimes are the problem, but most of the time they are all closed.
This happens most of the time when he tries to unmount them with the
command unount (I tried to make a script to solve the latter problem).
Unmounting them with nautilus most of time of just works, but even
then it sometimes refuses with "device is busy". Sometimes this can
be solved by killing fam, but even then it still claims to be busy.
I have not investigated in detail this with lsof yet.

2. MISSING GRAPHICAL SYSTEM TOOLS

(a) Hard disk partitioning
Gparted looks nice, could this be considered as part of main ?

(b) Define mount locations (edit /etc/fstab)
To manually have to edit an obscure config file like /etc/fstab is not
user-friendly. During installation, I think there is a (ncurses based)
program which let you link hard disk partitions to mount points. Is this
also a regular program? This would already be a huge improvement over
manually having to edit /etc/fstab. 
Furthermore, I think in gnome-system-tools there used to be a graphical
tool for this, but I can't find it anymore. Perhaps this has gone in
the splitting of the program in a graphical front-end and the real
utilities?

3. SUGGESTED PROGRAMS FOR MAIN:

(a) More and more people have bluetooth enabled cell phones. It would be
nice if gnome-bluetooth could be transferred to main. Some system tools,
like settings up a rfcomm port are also not graphically possible. Other
bluetooth enabled programs would also be nice, for controlling music
for example bluemote or bluexmms.

(b) id3-tagger. Rhythmbox depends completely on these tags, but there
is no program available to edit them. Easytag is the most powerful
program available, but is totally user-unfriendly. Perhaps some simpler
tag-program should be included in main.

(c) Burn audio and data-cd's, but this is already a heavy discussed
missing feature (graveman, gnomebaker, coaster, k3b).

(d) Backup program
Every experienced user will recommend to regularly backup your data.
There is however no graphical backup program available, and I couldn't
find something useful on the internet either. Are there any ones.
Functionality of could consist of:
  (*) run as daemon to suggest it's time to do a backup again
  (*) check the available space
  (*) suggestions what to backup: /home,/etc,/var/mail/
  (*) incremental backup, like faubackup does

(e) Syncing between PDA/Cell phone and Evolution
Multisync seems like the right choice. Maybe the project noodle could
become interesting too.

4. HARDWARE ISSUES

His computer is a laptop Toshiba Satellite A40

(a) During installation, a message was said that the network could not
be configured. However, when booted from the (warty) live CD, everything
was fine. When in the "Network configuration" tool, he added eth0 as a
dhcp, he still had no network. After reboot however, he all of sudden
had a network. Not sure what went wrong there, hard to really tell
what went wrong there, probably something that the knoppix-hardware
detection detected, the discover/hotplug didn't

(b) TV-out does not work. Just some simple googling didn't give much
information.

5. PROGRAM PROBLEMS (NON-UBUNTU RELATED)

(a) Rhythmbox hangs on non-ogg/mp3 files: 
Solved in hoary-gstreamer I think

(b) Evolution can't import his own settings from another
(home)directory.  You have to manually remove "~/.evolution" and
gconf:apps/evolution, then copy the old ~/evolution directory to the
home directory, after which it automatically converted everything, but
not the local mail.


Thanks for reading,

Sander