Comment 289 for bug 1

I had to replace my 5+ yrs old Dell Inspiron 8000 because the display
cable broke. I went shopping and finally decided to buy a
HP Compaq nw 9440. Nice machine. Of couse it came with XP "preinstalled".
I erased this soon after unpacking and installed Ubuntu 6.10.

Works mostly fine, although there are still some minor issues with ACPI
Standby. It would be nice, if HP Compaq could be convinced to deliver
these machines with Ubuntu preinstalled. ;-)

Some examples which I think needed to be improved in Ubuntu:
* Third party software vendors still have problems to package software for
  installation on Linux systems. By default Ubuntu still mounts CDROMs with
  ``noexec`` and users have no choice to even execute an "install.sh" or
  a "Run_me_first.sh" on a software CD. This is too paranoid for the average
  desktop user.

* Third party Software vendors have no easy way to figure out, which version
  of Ubuntu is installed on a particular computer in order to deal with backward
  compatibility issues: There is no ``/etc/Ubuntu_version`` and the file
  ``/etc/debian_version`` still tells ``testing/unstable``.

* Plugged a DV-Camera into the firewire port: I (as an experienced user) had
  no problem to figure out, why I had no permissions on /dev/raw1394 and
  that I had the choice to either add me to the group ``disk`` or modifiy
 ``/etc/udev/rules.d/40-permissions.rules`` and taking the risk, that some other
  user might eventually gain root priviliges by plugging a rogue firewire disk into
  my notebook. But what about Joe Randomuser who simply wants to make a DVD
  with some recordings of his kids (I use ``kino`` a rather great program BTW)?
  But I guess that the average Joe Randomuser still has problems to figure out what
  to do with the CDROM, that came with his Canon, Sony or whatever Camera
  which simply says, that Windows 98/nt/2000/xp is required to run the included
  software package.

Enough ranting. Ubuntu is marvelous, but there is still work to be done.

Regards,
Peter Funk