Dear All
This question has been raised at an opportune moment. Literally yesterday I
answered a cry for help from a friend whose 1 month-old HP desktop had been
completely trashed by viruses which had taken over all administrator rights and
installed massive amounts of malware. Having come from Currys there was, of
course, no Windows 7 installation disk, only a recovery partition which
appeared to have been compromised.
Not being in a position to spend £110 on a new installation disk my friend
asked if there was anything I could do. She'd vaguely heard of a Mac but never
Linux. I decided to create a system that would be as familiar to her as
possible.
I installed Ubuntu 10.4 LTS. I removed the bottom task bar completely so as not
to complicate matters with the concept of workspaces. I moved the top task bar
to the bottom of the screen, then added the task list applet so that open
applications would each be represented by a familiar button. I removed the
Firefox and Help icons to complete the Windows look-and-feel as far as possible.
I created desktop icons for the following basic applications:
OpenOffice Writer
OpenOffice Calc
OpenOffice Impress
Rhythmbox
Totem
Brasero
Firefox
Calculator
GNU Paint (after installation)
GIMP (after installation)
Because these application names would not be familiar to the average Windows
user I renamed the icons by their function e.g Word Processor, Spreadsheet,
Music Player, CD/DVD Burner, etc.
The only time I needed to use the command line was to run a Bash script to
download and install the libdvdcss objects, to enable the playing of commercial
encrypted DVDs; this after having installed the Ubuntu Restricted Extras from
the software centre. Fortunately my friend is not a games player, so there is
not really any functional loss through this unexpected migration to Ubuntu.
The reaction so far has been very favourable. She will never be a geek or a
nerd but I do think we may have gained a convert.
Regards
Nige
--
[email protected]
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
