Success! (times 10)

I  wish you luck. I had a similar agreement sometime ago but it just couldn't be sustained... sigh

I've been using the netbook remix for my wife. It does seem to work a lot better for people that don't know as much about computers. My main problem with her was having her remember keyboard shortcuts, so the launcher buttons are nice... Plus I'm testing out the new netbook-launcher in 9.10 now(yeah I got rid of arch already) and it looks really nice, still a little buggy though.

I installed linux (first tried Xubuntu then Zenwalk) on a friend's computer but its so old that flash doesn't play well. Also he wanted video for Yahoo IM.

Except for those two issues, he generally had no problem with it.

Only hitch so far, aside from her getting annoyed at minor differences is that the cd's that come with her books for nursing school wont run on ubuntu. They're just interactive CD's with practice questions at the end of a lesson and so forth...and they just dont want to work for some reason so thats kind of a big draw back as her computer is 99% school/school-internets and 1% internets that arent school related.

Did you try them in wine?

actually wine has gotten pretty simple, usually all I need to do is install wine. Then run winecfg and go to the audio tab and it'll select the correct audio output. Then just run:
wine whatever.exe
and about 8 times out of 10 thats all I need to do.

I took Vista off my girlfriends laptop (with permission) and replaced it with crunchbang. Used to take over 4 minutes to start up and launch firefox. Now thats down to about 46 seconds

She's fairly happy with it. All she needs is wireless internet, music player and word processor.

She does rub it in every now and then that Facebook Poker won't work with Linux Flash for some reason but other than that she has no problems.

I would like to change my dads laptop and my sister's pc to linux but I don't live near and might not be available to remote login if something went wrong. Best that it's windows for them so that in case of emergency they can find someone who can troubleshoot xp.

My dad uses his laptop for work, and may need to have other people use it from time to time so #! would really make that awkward.
But a dual boot setup might be perfect for my sister, if I can remove the need for AVG scans and updates and get boot & response times down. There's a new project for when I go home again

I think that people who have used computers since before Win95 look at them differently. The internet has only become widespread, socially, over the last 10 years, for the most part anyway. I was messing with an old 286 when I was 3, back in the 80s. My dad would open a .doc with sidekick in DOS and I'd smack the keyboard for half an hour. Few years later and he showed me how to write a basic batch file.

If you've seen changes from DOS > windows 3.1 > Win95 you're used to change. Probably embrace it. But if you've just watched Windows95 become Windows 7, then you've only seen aesthetic changes, improved performance, and under the hood stuff that most people don't pay any attention to. These people ,for the most part, have not experienced any change in their work process, and don't see why they should. Nothing wrong with that point of view but I'm sure most Linux users are glad that they don't share it!

Last edited by briantm (2009-09-14 14:41:18)

just change all the laptop/boxes over to #! then its a new learning game for her! thats what i did, a quick intro lesson and all seems fine, and that was a while ago now, unfortunatly she is starting a new course at uni so windows may make an apperence on one machine just so i dont keep getting asked questions when im away on 'why/how do i get this autorun cd to work!etc'

hehe