Most of the names on the wall are notoriously hard to discern. However, numerous fans have expended a great deal of effort to blow up these images and get as much as possible.
Apparently, Mars is one of the candidate names. Mars is the marshal who tracked Kate down and arrested her. He died the day after the crash, which sure isn't much time on the island. This suggests to me that he was a candidate prior to coming to the island, and therefore was likely brought to the island because he was a candidate. Not that he became a candidate because he wound up on the island. It makes no sense to consider him a candidate after he is fatally impaled during the accident, with no apparent hope for survival. How could such a person be a candidate? His candidacy precedes the crash.
We know that Rousseau's name was on the wall, as were Linus, Goodspeed and Faraday. Pickett is in there, too, and he was one of the Others.
There are numerous names that are unfamiliar to me. Are any of these names associated with characters I'm forgetting? Or have names from the plane's manifest ever been read on the show, thereby indicating that some of these people were on the plane but died in the crash? Survivors in the tail section?
Mattingly, Brennan, Rutherford, Martin, Burke, Goldstein, Troupe, Bargas, Almeida, Lewis, Straume, Costa, Sceckler, Harggus, O'Toole, Amistad, Jones, Yaris, Oralingo, Aguella, Jenkins, Domingo, Cunningham, Fernandez, Henderson, Grant, Aguila, Chang, Carner, Lacombe, Pickett, Reynolds, Sullivan, ...-ski?
(Interesting that the greatly mysterious ship at Black Rock is a slave ship... and one of the names on the wall is the name of the most famous slave ship ever - Amistad. Probably just an easter egg, though. I realize the ship was not the Amistad.)
By the way, notice the large number of Hispanic names? Roughly a third of the names. Did they arrive together on the island along with Ricardus (who apparently was in chains), perhaps on a ship?
One more observation. I'm watching the first episode, right now. Right after a commercial break, Jack and Kate are standing at the crash site, and people are milling around, behind them, out of focus. Right before the commercial, the survivors had heard and (sort of) saw the monster in the jungle, knocking trees down, in the middle of the night. But here, the following morning, you hear Rose comment to other survivors that the sound the monster made was distinctly familiar to her.
"I keep thinking there was something really familiar about it."
The makers of the show made sure this dialogue was audible as Jack and Kate stood there silently, waiting for their turn to dialogue. Rose's comments were definitely not obvious, but they were clearly made available to the audience intentionally.
Later, Jack and Kate and Charlie find the cockpit and the pilot, and the pilot is explaining how the plane went off course... when Smokey shows up and yanks the pilot right out the window and kills him... before the pilot can spill the beans about anything he shouldn't.
Widmore controlls Oceanic, and Widmore is apparently on the side of MIB. We know this because Widmore told Locke he must return to the island because there's a war coming... and Faraday's mother Eloise said that Locke's body must return to the island as well... and when Bram and the other servants of Jacob met Miles (in a flashback), Bram told Miles that he (Miles) is working for the wrong side. Miles was being hired by Widmore to go to the island. Therefore, Widmore and his crew were under the direction of MIB, who wanted Locke's body to return to the island. Obviously, MIB wanted Locke's body, which he is now "locked" into.
Widmore covered up the plane crash with a cover story. And we know that Lapidus was supposed to be the pilot of that flight, but another pilot was switched in his place to take the plane over there. The radio mysteriously quit working 6 hours into the flight, causing the pilots to predictably change direction toward Fiji, which then took the plane directly over the island, which all seems very convenient and leads me to believe that MIB had Widmore send the plane (and the candidates aboard) to the island.
So, as they're talking to the pilot in the cockpit, Smokey makes a beeline straight for that location and takes out the pilot before he can say too much.
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