add "wizards" for commonly needed non-default packages

Please see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CommonCustomizations

Without any use cases we cannot discuss this issue:

Which packages do you think of exactly?

Which apps do you search but don't find? Which terms don't lead to a good result? Which esoteric terms? There is still room to improve the search "engine" of gnome-app-install.

There is an effort to translate all package descriptions, it is called ddtp. The name and the short description of an app should already be translated if the app is available in your language.

Cheers,

Sebastian

Which packages: I think most candidates are listed on the wiki page you reference (there are a small number of non-candidates because we can't distribute them of course), but starting with a smaller selection might be useful.

Examples of search terms not working when I "play an ordinary user":
- itunes (searching for something that plays the CD tracks that I ripped using iTunes, none of the results work and I had to install KDE to try some of them)
- ipod (as I played the tracks above on my iPod)
- aac (they have an .aac extension, but doesn't help either)
- mid (searching for an application to open a .mid file; seems like The GIMP is the most popular tool to do that? :-p )

But seriously, you can't keep adding keywords, as the only result would be that you get too many results (remember where best to hide a tree?). One problem is that people search for solutions, equivalences, relations (iTunes instead of the music format), ... and not for program names or descriptions. So I think the search problems are not really fixable, although it might be possible to improve them a bit.

But another problem is with more experienced people being hasty and/or lazy, and not wanting to search for all those packages every time, and those are the people who point less experienced people to 'automatix' or 'easyubuntu' (even after being told not to do that).

And actually, how do I tell someone what to install to make their Ubuntu install "usable" when there is no Ubuntu computer around?

BTW: I said "or something else"; maybe instead of a wizard, we can just add a category with those "popular needed packages" in the list box at the left and name it 'automatix' or 'easyubuntu'... ;-)

Anyway, I'm not sure yet about the best "fix" for this bug, but I'm getting more and more convinced that _requiring_ people to search (the current approach) is the wrong solution.

I'm a newbie. I can't get movies (mpeg, avi, wmv) to play in Movie Player or Noatun (apparently I don't have the appropriate decoder). I've searched for, and installed, anything and everything that looks like it could be relevant. No luck.
It would be really nice to have some simple way of installing "popular needed packages" although it would be even nicer if Movie Player et al offered to install relevant packages when first downloaded.
Anyway, I did come across easyubuntu and thought it just the thing. Unfortunately, though easyubuntu claimed to install three packages for me, I still can not play any video files. Following ubuntu instructions I get, at one point, the error message
"svn: Berkeley DB error while opening 'nodes' table for filesystem /home/svn/repos/easyubuntu/db: Cannot allocate memory
svn: bdb: Unable to allocate memory for transaction detail". That is, easyubuntu is useless for me.

I know it is possible to play mpegs in Movie Player under Ubuntu, for I have it working on another machine, set up some months ago. But I remember it taking me many, many hours spread over many days to finally get the right files downloaded. I have no interest in going through that hassle again. There has got to be a better way.

Fixed by the the ubuntu-restricted-extras package and the on demand codec installation in feisty.