My personal feature requests for Fedora 8

[clue]

I know that it is a little late, to add suggestions for Fedora 7. So i'll submit them instead for the following release:

1a.) Encrypted filesystem: During install, user should be asked, if he/she wants the partitions to be encrypted. (refer - for example - to the German EPROS-Projekt)
1b.) That means, a powerful, but easy to use, gui driven program has to be added to the rescue/install disc, in order to rescue data/make the system accessible, in case something goes wrong.

2.) Ejection sometimes fails, due to a program accessing the disc: Let a window pop up, stating the programs wich are accessing the disc, and ask, if they should be closed, in order to get the disc ejected.

3.) Every word-processor (i.e. OpenOffice, Kedit, Kmail ...) should select whole words, when marking text with left mouse button. At this point of time, they only select single characters. But who would ever want to select only a few characters of a word, cut and paste them somewhere else, and leave the rest of the word just standing there? This doesn't make much sense to me. Users shouldn't have to move exactly to the beginning of a word, in order to get it selected completely. That's inconvenient - IMHO. I know, it works with keyboard. But why should i have to switch constantly between mouse and keyboard? (I posted this already to the OpenOffice people, but they said, it is just fine with keyboard). Has MS$ a patent on this feature, that now one else is allowed to add it to their products?

[JonC]

1) interesting idea
2) good idea
3) bad idea. maybe as an option, but it REALLY gets on my nerves when programs think they know better. I often want to select bits and pieces. It is plenty easy enough to move the mouse a bit further.

[markkuk]

1. Already on F7 feature list: http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Re...tedFilesystems
2. No opinion on this one
3. I agree with JonC, selection should work on exactly what I paint with the mouse.

[clue]

3.) Ok, then let there be a key wich toggles behaviour.

[Dies]

Originally Posted by JonC

3) bad idea. maybe as an option, but it REALLY gets on my nerves when programs think they know better. I often want to select bits and pieces. It is plenty easy enough to move the mouse a bit further.

OMG, thank you, I thought it was just me, I mean I constantly select half a word to delete, if it were to automatically select the whole word that would make me after a while.

As far as eject, I haven't really noticed it, but I'm all for fixes.

Personally I have no use for encrypted file systems, the reality is that probably 90%+ don't have a need for that, those that do usually have no problem setting it up for themselves, maybe the option should be there for those that want it, but a popup asking whether you want it or not is probably overkill IMHO. But then I think Selinux is overkill for most users, lol. I'm not very paranoid, I don't keep anything worthwhile on my PC.

[brunson]

2. Not a bad idea. You could help make it happen by writing a PyGTK application to do it. The mechanism to find the processes using a file are in the source for /sbin/fuser, which is part of the psmisc rpm.
3. Terrible idea. Just because that's how you want it to work doesn't mean anyone else does.

[clue]

@brunson

2.) I would really like to make it happen. But unfortunately i've not learned any programming language and really no idea how to do it. But i hope that someone else, who has this skills will read this post, write the program, and present it to the fedora developers. That would improve user experience and make an end to the annoying ejection issue - once and for all. So the idea is there, we only need a hero to rescue us all ...

[pete_1967]

Originally Posted by clue

3.) Every word-processor (i.e. OpenOffice, Kedit, Kmail ...) should select whole words, when marking text with left mouse button. At this point of time, they only select single characters. But who would ever want to select only a few characters of a word, cut and paste them somewhere else, and leave the rest of the word just standing there? This doesn't make much sense to me. Users shouldn't have to move exactly to the beginning of a word, in order to get it selected completely. That's inconvenient - IMHO. I know, it works with keyboard. But why should i have to switch constantly between mouse and keyboard? (I posted this already to the OpenOffice people, but they said, it is just fine with keyboard). Has MS$ a patent on this feature, that now one else is allowed to add it to their products?

Just put your mouse cursor over the word you want to highlight and double click to select it, triple click to select whole sentence. You have 3 options to easily higlight and select exactly what you want, why do you want to remove one of them?

[sej7278]

1. i hope is in f7, it was supposed to be, hopefully with a passphrase prompt in grub (so you can encrypt swap too).

2. i don't want a gui, just a way to mount the encrypted partitions, i.e. fuse must be on the rescue cd.

3. that's a microsoft office-ism and a really annoying "feature"

[DamianS]

1. unneccessary. Encryption is yet another thing which can go wrong. Just think of the consequences if a single bit, just one single bit on your partition, flips. Your entire partition is toast!
Also, there will be performance disadvantages. Disk access is slow enough already without making it worse.
And just imagine the posts in forums and elsewhere by newbs who agree to encrypt their fs without knowing exactly what it is, and who forget their password?
These, and other issues mean that FS encryption will be a marginal option at best, useful only to criminals and spooks.

2. interesting idea

3. Not needed.
This is easily done now, by double clicking on a word, then moving the mouse pointer across the words to be selected.
Why introduce yet another way to do this?

[Dan]

Morning clue.

The easiest way to get Help info in Open Office, is to select the Help menu, then, OpenOffice.org Help, or just press the F1 key.

[JN4OldSchool]

Originally Posted by pete_1967

Just put your mouse cursor over the word you want to highlight and double click to select it, triple click to select whole sentence. You have 3 options to easily higlight and select exactly what you want, why do you want to remove one of them?

Damn, I read above, knew this, tested it, got excited and was about to post it and thought "I bet someone else knows this..." and read the rest of the posts...

edit: Oh, as far as F8...well...I am curious how the new install discs will pan out. The KDE distro and the Gnome distro...I hope they can get a basic install down to one CD. Really, I am happy with Fedora. Sure, there are thiongs I dont much care for but Fedora is Fedora and is currently perfect as such. Dont change a thing, just keep on keeping on. I wont even try to guess the new developments being worked on. Beryl is still blowing me away. It just gets better and better. So no, nothing on my wish list....Well, wait. Just one thing. Provide an easy to figure out net install. Screw /boot images and such. Just give us a 50MB download that will get a net install like debian etch going. For me this is by far the best way to install an OS. I dont have old packages on the disc, I just install fresh so I am not downloading everything twice. My fresh install wont need a major update. I can set everything up and just let it install over the net overnight while I sleep. I prefer to install just the bare essential packages on install then add the apps I need. My FC is bloated but that is my "test/play" distro where I try new things and never get rid of anything. Most of my other installs are very trimmed down and sleek. Yeah...this is my one big wish. Use debian as the model, that was by far the best Linux install i have ever done.

[clue]

@ DamianS

Thank you very much, DamianS! You can't imagine, how many hours i spent, searching for a way to get this feature. I read the online help, read in forums, googled ... And now someone tells me, that it has already been implemented all the time, without me knowing of it. THANK YOU VERY MUCH!
And best of all: It works in all apps, that i tested (Kedit, OpenOffice, Kmail).
What a pity that it was not easy to find in the online help (i mean OpenOffice). Perhaps i was too stupid, but perhaps the doc's could have said it more clearly. But then again, it works now, and i'm happy about it. Thank you all for your comments and help with this feature.

[JoeyJoJoe]

I hope I'm not hijacking this thread or corpsing but I too have a request for a new feature in Fedora (and all linuxes actually),

Is there any way we could use the smartmontools which I think we all have installed to check hard drives automatically (like how you can set up smartctl to run as a cron job) and then give an output in a graphical way, maybe a pop up or something - like how the new update thingy works. It could give you just some general info about your HD like how approximately long it had left or if any of the elements had gone into pre-fail or (worse) FAILING_NOW. This would give you lots of notice usually because you'd be able to see things going into old age and then pre-fail and when they got to failing now you could back up and ditch the drive without having to lose all your data.
I say this as a man who has just lost a hard drive, although the smart tools were really useful in determining the problem.

Just a thought.

Also, 2) is a really good idea ^, and I like the idea of an easily encrypted HD although I worry about people forgetting their passwords - maybe you'd need something like GRUB has to change passwords, but then I guess if someone steals your computer itself (which is when encryption would be most useful) it would defeat the whole point... with great power comes great responsibility

[clue]

Yes, that has also been my thought. Gnu/Linux should provide more gui's for essential programs, to make it easier to use. One good thing is, that KDE4 tries to provide notification features, and also will help managing hardware. It tries to unite different ways of getting things done (under GNU/Linux) in one desktop enviroment (though KDE-devs say, that it would possibly last to version 4.1, till they can achieve at least one of these goals). KDE rulez!

BTW.: I've seen, that Debian 4.0 will also allow encryption of disc.