|
Page 1 of 2 They
say its for geeks, they say its for nerds, they say its for those whose
pinkie finger has the imprint of the enter key tattooed on it. We say
its for your grandmother ! Yes my friends, I kid you not, for all of
those who are afraid to dip their little toe into the great Linux-Lake
let us reassure you : If your grandmother can do it ? So can you.
Before we start , let me clarify : We are not talking about turning
your Linux machine into a clustered database server with SQL, PHP,
Apache, Samba and what have you. We are talking about the advantages of
using Linux .. as a desktop. Why this experiment. I
have been toying around with Linux since 1999, Seen the first desktop
versions evolve and have seen the Linux OS grow in strength on the
desktop. Last year I found out about Ubuntu Linux and have been doing
several articles and podcasts on the use of Ubuntu as a desktop system.
I am by no means a Linux zealot ! No pingu-pimping for me ! Drop me in
the Linux command line and I'm as lost as Debby Harry in a hair salon.
I do however have a philosophy about computer use. I think technology
should be safe and simple and that a computer should work for you and
not the other way around. Linux has always been seen as to hard and to
complicated. So it was time for a little experiment. Could we put
together a Linux desktop system that was simple to use, safe from
virusses spam and user mistakes, and had a lot of software to offer.
Could we build a Linux box that your grandma could use ? Well , lets
see. Step one : Find a grandmother. My
fiancé's family is pretty tech savvy , her dad is a computer wizz, her
mother is on MSN messenger all day, her sisters live on line and her
grandmother .. is right up the alley. Its not that they are all
computer freaks out there , they all just have an open mind towards
technology. Good old granny started out on her gaming trip some fifteen
years ago when she swiped a hand-console Tetris game from one of her
grandchildren. An all night-gaming rush that night got her hooked on
these little hand held gaming consoles. Some two years ago she got a
second hand worn down IBM Thinkpad laptop running windows 95 for
running some simple games like .. surprise surprise.. Tetris and stuff.
So when she called me last week in a panic that she accidentally
deleted some shortcuts and 'could not get her games to work anymore'and
in her despair, was even suggesting buying herself a brand new laptop
.. it was time to jump in . 
Step Two : Find a laptop Finding
a laptop for cyber-granny was not all that hard. My fiancé's dad had an
old Compaq laptop lying around that was no longer in active duty. With
an 800 mhz Processor and 256 meg of ram it had been set out to pasture
because of a defective PCMCIA slot on the motherboard. Apparently force
feeding a PCMCIA card upside down into its slot does not bode well for
the laptop. So it did no longer have wireless capability and since the
family had bought a new laptop .. it was just laying around. One
discarded laptop, one grandma in need .. Cheque please ! Step Three : Somebody get me a penguin. With
our laptop secured under our arm it was time to browse trough some
available operating systems to help “La mama” out. The quota's that
needed to be met were : This
kind of ruled out Windows XP pro right off the bat. Several Linux
distributions offered themselves up but thanks to the fantastic
automatix script, Ubuntu took the cake. So it was time to let
loose the beast. Downloading a standard iso Image from the 5.10 version
was about 20 minutes work and the whole installation process took about
an hour. The simple installation only bothered us with the country
settings, keyboard layout and a user name. No problem there. We let it
have the entire hard disk at its disposal so we did not have some boot
loader clogging up the startup process. As easy as firing up a toaster
was the objective here. When the bongo's rumbled to announce
the first successful boot up we went straight to the Synaptic package
manager and started adding games to our installation. Ubuntu comes with
some games in the standard configuration, but when you look in Synaptic
its like uncovering the lost island of Arcadia. Some games are action
based , a lot of them are brain breakers and stuff. Ideal for our test
subject. We loaded the distro up with some 100 some games and that was
that. Now what do you do when you've beat Tetris for the 500th
time and can't see another polygon for the rest of the evening ? You
watch a movie right ? Unfortunately most Linux distributions come
without support for playing mpeg2 (dvd's) and mp3 support. It has to do
with some legal stuff if i remember correctly. But with Ubuntu we have
a little solution for this called : The automatix script. These three
lines of code will give you a little GUI in the system menu where you
can select all the goodies you want. Realplayer, WMV support , Skype,
DVD playback etc... Its a simple as pie : Enter these three lines of code in your terminal window. sudo apt-get install xterm
wget http://beerorkid.com/automatix/automatix_5.1-1_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i automatix_5.1-1_i386.deb When
you go into the systems menu and look for the automatix application. We
selected MP3, WMV, DVD playback and Flash support. Once OK is clicked,
Ubuntu does it all for you. For those who are interested HERE is the automatix manual
Step Four : Sense some simplicity.
Now its no good to have a complicated system for our super granny now is it. Time to simplify the whole deal. Step two : Could i see the menu please ?
thanks to the Gnome desktop the menu is pretty simple as it is (somehow
the KDE setup is just too “U-bundant” for me. But a lot of options on
the menu where just not needed. So we added the games menu, the dvd and
cd player icon and the shutdown icon to the main menu bar and removed
everything else. Next up the menu bar was set at the bottom of the
screen and the bar you see below was set up top. I left an icon for the
main “start” menu there so I could access all the other programs and
settings if needed.  - Step three : Explaining how it works :
Ok Grann, here is how it works. Press the blue button to start up the
computer. Wait until you hear the music. Then you have four buttons on
the bottom on the screen. One will give you a menu with ALL the games.
If you want to play a movie, just pop in a dvd and click on the second
button with the little film reel on it. Want to play some music ? pop
in the music cd and click on the little cd. And to shut down the system
just click on the little door there.
Thats it , half an
hour later granny was trained into using the computer, had a shit load
of games to choose from, could play movies and music cd's and was able
to boot up and shutdown her system without ever having to worry about
pressing the wrong button. Who EVER said Linux was hard ? Conclusion. Needless
to say , Nana was thrilled. She had a stable and secure operating
system and did not have to worry about pressing the wrong buttons
because quite frankly .. there where none. A grin as wide as the
Brooklyn bridge spread across her face when she saw the entire
selection of games she could play and not have to worry about breaking
anything in the process. “ This is much easier than the previous one”
she uttered casting a wayward glance to her old Windows computer. I”ll be keeping tabs on our cyber-grandmother in the next few weeks to see how she gets along with her new system. Now
with computers coming more and more abundant in our everyday lives, its
natural that everybody wants one, including everyone in your family.
But as the family-computer-geek (and professional IT consultant) it
would just turn into a nightmare providing support for everyone. So
using a simplified Ubuntu installation does keep calls about viruses,
broken os'es and spy-ware away. Even if she decided to go on line, I
would just have to add the Firefox and Gaim buttons to her menu bar,
give her a crash course in chat'n-surf and she would be on her way. No
high maintenance on this operating system. So to round it up ? Who ever
said Linux was hard and complicated. When handled right it can be a
simpler and safer operating system to plant down in the soil of an
unexperienced user. Ok , you can't install all the cd's you see in the
shop, but Linux comes with all these goodies built in ! This way you
even save money. So the question is : Have you seen your granny lately ? 
 | LIST OF COMMENTS .... |
|
 | 1. Written by Guest/Visitor
Saturday, 27 May 2006 | | Awesome...I
did the same thing for my computer illiterate parents with an old AMD
950mhz, 512mb RAM computer system. Threw Ubuntu on it, made a few
shortcuts for various things and let them go wild. | | |
| | 2. Written by Guest/Visitor
Saturday, 27 May 2006 | | Nice
Article!
My father is living far away in another country, and has an old PC
running windoze installed by a jerk (me). As time goes by, the machine
is slower, the OS needs more resources, the antivirus too and from time
to time a blue screen makes him angry.
Right now the computer is so slow that my father don´t want to use it.
Next time I will install Ubuntu or something similar, lesson learned!
:::db::: | | |
| | 3. Written by Guest/Visitor
Saturday, 27 May 2006 | | You can do the same exact thing with Xp. I locked it down using DeepFreeze; moved here profile to a thawed drived. | | |
| | 4. Written by Guest/Visitor
Saturday, 27 May 2006 | | Excellent! Just what I need - a guide for setting up a pc for gran :P | | |
| | 5. Written by Guest/Visitor
Saturday, 27 May 2006 | | Great
job! Not only for illiterate grandparents, but also illiterate people
like myself who shun Linux because of its difficulties with multimedia.
My old Sony Vaio PIII 500mHz with 256mb RAM has been resurrected! | | |
| | 6. Written by Guest/Visitor
Saturday, 27 May 2006 | | The honor is to serve :)
Knightwise. | | |
| | 7. Written by Guest/Visitor
Saturday, 27 May 2006 | | "You
can do the same exact thing with Xp. I locked it down using DeepFreeze;
moved here profile to a thawed drived."
Well, that addresses Requirement A ("Easy to Use"), but B ("Safe from
Malware") and C ("Free") are left wanting. Ubuntu would still be far
preferable to WinXP in this regard.
To the author: Great article! | | |
| | 8. Written by Guest/Visitor
Saturday, 27 May 2006 | Yeah, I did this for my gran...
2 weeks later I get this phone call asking whether she should malloc a
string buffer in a calling function and pass in the pointer or use a
factory pattern.
I nearly dropped my knitting. | | |
| | 9. Written by Guest/Visitor
Saturday, 27 May 2006 | | Well,
okay, but what about semi-computer-literate grandparents that started
out with a TRS-80 in the 70s, moved to IBM-PC in the 80s and discovered
Norton Commander, started using Windows 3.1 in the 90s, and get around
comfortably in Windows 2000 - and who would use Linux except "It doesnt
look like Windows", meaning they really want the thin taskbar at the
bottom of the screen, not fat buttons centered at the bottom, and "I
cant run Total Commander" and "Wheres my taskbar clock?" | | |
| | 10. Written by Knightwise
Saturday, 27 May 2006 | | The key is to make it LOOK like windows then. As simple and as familiar to windows as you can. Trick the user. | | |
| | 11. Written by Guest/Visitor
Saturday, 27 May 2006 | | And is there a page that explains how to do that? | | |
| | 12. Written by Guest/Visitor
Saturday, 27 May 2006 | | Oh, but this is not news. I put a grandma on Linux with Ubuntu 5.04 some time ago:
http://beranger.org/index.php?article=289
| | |
| | 13. Written by Guest/Visitor
Sunday, 28 May 2006 | | "somehow the KDE setup is just too “U-bundant” for me"
hmm, flame war at hand? Gnome is probably just right for oldies... | | |
| | 14. Written by Guest/Visitor
Sunday, 28 May 2006 | | Nice!
what about a grandbuntu? | | |
| | 15. Written by Guest/Visitor
Sunday, 28 May 2006 | | Hmm,
alright, not "free", but if you bought a system with XP pre-installed,
you would need to set granny up with a "user" level account and reserve
the administrator options to a password protected account.
Problem solved. -Kevin | | |
| | 16. Written by Guest/Visitor
Monday, 29 May 2006 | | Maybe
when setting up an account, an easy|intermediate|advanced /etc/skel
could be in order? root would get advanced by default (including stuff
in */sbin), "guest" would get easy (no systems menu, no membership of
wheel or equivalent), and named would get intermediate...
With "guest will log in in 30 seconds, or hit return", novices will do
just that, so that they will get a safe and easy desktop by default. | | |
| | 17. Written by Guest/Visitor
Friday, 02 June 2006 | | "It doesnt look like Windows"
If the new user is not comfortable with an os other than windows try getting them started with xpde as the window manager.
http://www.xpde.com/ | | |
| | 18. Written by Guest/Visitor
Sunday, 04 June 2006 | | In
response to Kevin, running XP as user rather than administrator is
problematic. A number of programs only run as administrator--Norton
antivirus update comes to mind. I know this from unpleasant experience.
Once, as a security measure, I tried changing all our office accounts
from administrator to user. Within a week I had switched them all back
again. It seems that MS is trying hard to correct this problem in Vista. | | |
| | 19. Written by Guest/Visitor
Wednesday, 07 June 2006 | | love this article :) | | |
| | 20. Written by Guest/Visitor
Wednesday, 05 July 2006 | | Esta muy bien de que Linux este pasando las fronteras viva GNU/LINUX
Saludos
| | |
|
Digg/Knightwise
Flickr/Knightwise
YouTube/knightwise
Del.icio.us/knightwise
Skype/knightwise
GMail/Knightwise
T-norati/Knightwise
11 links from 9 sites
