Comments on: Ubuntu for mother in law = yay! http://www.phpprogrammer.co.nz/ubuntu-for-mother-in-law-yay Hamish's blog all about PHP Programming Mon, 30 Aug 2010 20:05:35 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 By: admin http://www.phpprogrammer.co.nz/ubuntu-for-mother-in-law-yay/comment-page-1#comment-5372 admin Sun, 14 Mar 2010 21:37:17 +0000 http://www.phpprogrammer.co.nz/?p=21#comment-5372 Great story! Yeah there's nothing like being able to ssh into a box remotely to fix it. No need to leave my comfortable coding cave ;) Great story! Yeah there's nothing like being able to ssh into a box remotely to fix it. No need to leave my comfortable coding cave ;)

]]> By: MvdS http://www.phpprogrammer.co.nz/ubuntu-for-mother-in-law-yay/comment-page-1#comment-5371 MvdS Sun, 14 Mar 2010 21:21:30 +0000 http://www.phpprogrammer.co.nz/?p=21#comment-5371 Over the last few months of 2009, my mother in law's Windblow$ became slower, things stopped working, until, just before Christmas, it no longer booted at all. There was good news, bad news and more good news. The good news is that I had been thinking for a while to install Linux on her PC to give her a more secure, stabler environment. The bad news is that we live on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Finally, the other good news is that there was an ancient Madrake partition present. So over Christmas, I had her boot Linux, I logged in remotely and upgraded her ancient version of Mandrake to a much more recent edition of Mandriva. I copied her Documents directory to her home directory (the Windblow$ partition was at least in part intact), installed OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin and Skype and she can use her PC just as before. Moreover, as sometimes happens with not-too-confident computer users, if she screws something up, it is firstly limited to her user account and doesn't affect the operating system (Linux doesn't allow normal users to screw up the OS), and secondly, I can log in and fix it. A nice example is that she recently managed to change the audio settings in Skype so that her microphone didn't work anymore; nothing that can't be 'fixed' in 5 minutes in this case, but dread the idea to do it in Windblow$. Thank you Linux and open-source software! Over the last few months of 2009, my mother in law's Windblow$ became slower, things stopped working, until, just before Christmas, it no longer booted at all. There was good news, bad news and more good news. The good news is that I had been thinking for a while to install Linux on her PC to give her a more secure, stabler environment. The bad news is that we live on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Finally, the other good news is that there was an ancient Madrake partition present.

So over Christmas, I had her boot Linux, I logged in remotely and upgraded her ancient version of Mandrake to a much more recent edition of Mandriva. I copied her Documents directory to her home directory (the Windblow$ partition was at least in part intact), installed OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin and Skype and she can use her PC just as before. Moreover, as sometimes happens with not-too-confident computer users, if she screws something up, it is firstly limited to her user account and doesn't affect the operating system (Linux doesn't allow normal users to screw up the OS), and secondly, I can log in and fix it. A nice example is that she recently managed to change the audio settings in Skype so that her microphone didn't work anymore; nothing that can't be 'fixed' in 5 minutes in this case, but dread the idea to do it in Windblow$.

Thank you Linux and open-source software!

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