Ubuntu easier for the 100% Ubuntu home network

Asked by wotthefrog

Ubuntu is a user-friendly OS that many people would like to see as their main desktop throughout the house. As families become more wired, each member ends up with a PC and these get networked.

At the moment a couple of things are needed to enable this to be easy for John Q Public and his family:

1) Easy export and mounting with GUI of NFS shares. At the moment only SMB shares can be mounted. Mounting between two linux machines using SMB is plain crazy! We should be able to run the network on open services without having to resort to FUD-linked systems like SMB.
There is currently a blueprint out at https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/nautilus-browse-nfs for this mounting. It should be a high priority.

2) Many home networks connect to the internet through a DSL modem. Unfortunately, this modem connection sometimes goes down.
SuSE have a really cooled applet called kinternet (under KDE, therefore) that can run on each PC and enables the user at that PC to see the status of the pppoe link and restart it, without going to the gateway PC. This applet is what makes my kids run their dual-boot machines under SuSE not Windows, and is why I run SUSE on my gateway, not Ubuntu. I don't know if kinternet and the SuSE Meta PPP daemon - SMPPPD runing on the gateway that it works with are proprietary SUSE that need licencing - they're not ported to anything else I can find - but for me this functionality is the number 1 show-stopper.

Cheers,

WotTheFrog

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Massimo Forti (slackwarelife) said :
#1

Thanks for your suggestion. Some of this idea are just ok in ubuntu 7.04. Some other there is a project like blueprints

Cheers Massimo

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wotthefrog (longpete) said :
#2

When you say "just OK", do you mean that it's already there in 7.04 (which I run on some of my machines)? I haven't found anything - otherwise I wouldn''t have asked the question? Which bits of my question are "just OK" and which

The bit I have found in a blueprint (see 1 above) has taken a year to get there and has not got any further than being a proposal three months after it was entered. My point was that it should be a priority.

Cheers, Wotthefrog

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Cesare Tirabassi (norsetto) said :
#3

Dear Wot,

I understand your unhappiness, and I really appreciate your interest in making ubuntu better.
I think you can indeed make a positive contribution and I would encourage you to actively partecipate in our community.

I think a good starting point could be this:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IdeaPool

Revision history for this message
Milduser (ytchwa) said :
#4

Hi

I can't agree with WotTheFrog more to make the Ubuntu OS better if the PPPoe dsl connection to the internet is more reliable and user friendly. Being new to the Linux world (less than 3 months) I love to make comparision with not only other OSes but even the various linux variants. In fact I've a triple boot in my PCs! XP, SUSE & of course Ubuntu. On restrospect, in terms of installations, XP is easiest, next SUSE and somehow Ubuntu is quite problematic. Despite it's weakness, I still LIKE Ubuntu as my preferred desktop OS. I've been quite comfortable with Ubuntu until I ran into this unreliable connection after I fiddle abit with the network install and options. I re-run PPPoeconf many times, start, restart, but still fail to connect. On searching for answers, I came upon many complaints on this area, especially DSL connections. When I stumble upon this post by wonthefrog, I was quite happy that he mentioned about the applet in SUSE in the form of Kinternet utility. It's good and hope Ubuntu can emulate. These comparisions, I hope are taken more positively as areas and ideas for improvements. As espress by this original post, it should deserved top priority.

Cheers.

Muiduser

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