On Saturday 22 January 2005 11:05 am, Rick Kunath wrote: > On Saturday 22 January 2005 03:42 pm, JR wrote: > > I think what I'll do is make her windows environment as linux-like as > > possiblel firefox, thunderbird and so forth. Then I'll install linux (she > > has plenty of disk space) and show her how easy it is. She will always > > have the choice - but she will surely find linux easier. I dread going > > near her laptop with windows on it and it's brand new! What a shame. > > Coming in at the end of this thread, some of this may have been commented > on earlier... > > I did exactly as you did with my wife's laptop. In Windows I installed > Firefox with a bunch of excellent extensions , and Thunderbird. After I > described some of the extensions and let her experiment with how much > better browsing is with Firefox, it became the browser of choice. > Thunderbird does email nicely, and the switch was painless. > > I've a bunch of machines here that dual-boot, so I began having her walk > through the Windows update procedures on them while I watched. The idea was > to get her familiar with the pain that updating Windows is. > > Once she became familiar with the browsing and email programs on Windows, I > had her boot into Mandrake and begin using the programs there. I did show > her Kmail, which she prefers to T-Bird. Once she got over the double-click > madness of Windows and learned how to single-click, everything went > smoothly. All of my machines run so much faster under Mandrake than they do > under Windows with all of the protection apps running, that it was really > noticable to her. > > A bit later I showed her how to update Mandrake using MCC, and she never > fails to comment at how easy keeping her machine up to date is. (I go over > the updates usually yet on one of the machines, but she happily offers to > update the other Mandrake machines, and does a fine job.) Soon, she'll be > on her own. > > I've used a few wireless cards under 10.0 and 10.1 and earlier releases. > Orinoco and Avaya cards (all cards 802.11b) worked fine, as did Prism 2.5 > cards and IBM's mini-PCI based Prism cards. I haven't done anything with g > yet. > > I don't know if anyone mentioned yet, but Mandrake has Mandrake Move > available, a CD-ROM based distro that runs without installing anything on > the computer, and one of the versions will support a USB memory stick, so > your values , passwords, and configuration can be saved across boots. You > could experiment with Linux without installing it, if all of your hardware > is supported under the limited set of supported hardware of Move. It isn't > as sweet as a real install, but it is non-intrusive. > > I've used lilo as a boot loader for years without issues on my dual-boot > machines here. > > One thing you may want to look at is getting a recovery disk set for the > new laptop. That way, should something go wrong, at least you'll be able to > restore the original setup. I always get them for machines I have, and had > to use them but once, for a non-Linux related issue. > > Rick Kunath
Thanks for that Rick, The main thing stopping me now is the fact that it is quite difficult to intergrate Firefox with KDE. I'm still having konqueror come up as default at times and I've tried using the script suggested on various sites, but they dont work properly for some reason. I can script a little and program a lot so I'm not computer illiterate - I feel this is a genuine stumbling block. Jarlath -- Copyrighting allows people to benefit from their labours, but software patents allow the companies with the largest legal departments to benefit from everyone else's work. Andrew Brown, The Guardian.
____________________________________________________ Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com ____________________________________________________
