Suggestions on packages to add to Ubuntu "main"

[J.B. Nicholson-Owens]

Tim Hull wrote:
> Kernel-source and kernel-tree (since sometimes kernel source is needed 
> to compile drivers from source)
 > Anything else required for compiling device drivers

Are beginners going to ever compile anything from source?  It's my 
understanding that Ubuntu is aimed at novices.

> A more modern PDF reading program than xpdf (like gpdf, for instance)

I have had more luck with xpdf than gpdf when opening documents.  I suspect the 
gpdf I tried didn't understand Type 3 fonts but xpdf does.

> Mozilla Thunderbird and some text mode internet software (as suggested 
> by someone else - it sounds good to me also)

Thunderbird is nice for most people most of the time (I'm using it right now, 
as a matter of fact), but so is Evolution is no slouch.  Thunderbird also 
suffers from the same problem as Firefox regarding third-party packaging which 
I describe below.

> Good CD burning software (maybe k3b - however, that has downside of 
> needing KDE libs),

As much as I appreciate K3B and how people need to burn CDs, I am curious about 
what CDs Nautilus can't burn (audio CDs and data CDs are the only CDs I think 
most people would want to burn).  Admittedly I can't get Ubuntu to burn any CD; 
I'm always prompted to remove the CD in the drive and put in a blank CD-R, even 
though one is already in there.  On a related note, Nautilus doesn't bring up a 
burn:/// window when I put a blank CD-R in the burner.

I'm hoping Sound-Juicer will make it easy to duplicate an audio CD.  That's 
something I think a lot of people would want to do.

> ltmodem/slmodem/hsfmodem drivers (and any other winmodem drivers)

Are there free software drivers for these modems?

> Captive - NTFS drivers for RW access to NTFS

Is there any technical reason this isn't enabled?  Ubuntu didn't see my NTFS 
disks when I rebooted with those drives physically attached to the system.  I 
was left with the impression that NTFS read-only support wasn't in the Ubuntu 
kernel.

> It seems like there would be enough space to add these things to the CD, 
> and it would make things go a lot smoother for new Linux users.

I agree for NTFS reading -- moving things from NTFS volumes to ext3 volumes 
would be easier via drag-and-drop in Nautilus -- and burning CDs, but I am 
hesitant to agree for compiling, PDF reading (right now), and e-mail clients.

On a related note, why pick Firefox over Epiphany?  As good as Firefox is, it 
still strikes me as an app built around a Microsoft Windows or MacOS X user who 
runs with administrator privilege all the time.  Firefox users are expected to 
upgrade the app via Firefox which is wholly incompatible with third-party 
packaging.