-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
My Dad asked me to assemble a box for him ... his first (and probably only)
brand new computer.
A couple months ago he had never touched a keyboard. Then he bought a thin
client that was absolutely useless to him after having been misled into
dropping $20 on nothing of any use to him. Then he found a box for $50.
Better ... it had 32M ram and a 2G HD and could run Win98 / AOL. It even had
a 14" monitor so it was fairly priced. Better, but still no kewpie doll.
AOL popups took their toll on him so he decided to get broadband to get away
from it. The cable company told him he needed heavier hardware than a P-133
(they are full of it ... we all know that ... but they insisted they couldn't
provide access to a lesser computer so I ended up building him a nice one.)
Well, tonight he got his first taste of 2.4G CPU and 256M of 266 bus DDR on a
32M video card.
On Linux.
I set the machine to dual-boot Mandrake 10 / Win98 with MDK the default.
Because 1) I had set it up using a KVM to my own monitor and 2) I somehow
overlooked kudzu, I ended up needing to reinstall MDK while he watched. Yes,
I know I could have booted to the diskette and probably have scrounged around
in the XFree86 config files and fixed things ... but not while he waited for
Linux to "do something". It was faster (for me) and far easier for him to
understand to simply say "Hmmm ... I was afraid that might happen. I've gotta
reinstall Mandrake. This will take a few minutes." Beside which ... can you
imagine me trying to explain what I was doing as root, running vi on the
video config files to a guy who has never seen a DOS command line? That's a
'no starter'.
Once I got it reinstalled I walked him through the directory structure to
where the games were ... er, um ... to where the games should have been. They
weren't there. So I used the Mandrake package manager to pick up 43 programs
from the install CD's with him watching. Click, click, done.
He played with PySOL for a little while, fiddling with the decks and so on and
then we booted into Windows to install his Windows card games. After the
first CD installed, I declined to reboot. After the second one installed I
pointed to the two messages onscreen asking for a reboot and pointed out that
Linux had installed 43 programs without rebooting at all, whereas Windows
wanted a reboot for each program.
My Dad is 77 years old. Less than 60 days ago he had never touched a computer.
Tonight he is using Linux every bit as skillfully as he uses Windows.
So much for the "Joe Sixpack" argument, eh?
Yes, you can make the argument that he couldn't actually install Mandrake.
But, then again, he couldn't have installed Windows, either. But he can use
both and agrees that he got a lot more bang for his buck with Linux.
Bill
- --
http://cannaday.us (genealogy)
http://organic-earth.com (organic gardening)
Uptimes below for the machines that created / host these sites.
22:44:00 up 7 days, 6:28, 4 users, load average: 0.15, 0.18, 0.14
22:39:00 up 108 days, 1:51, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.3 (GNU/Linux)
iD8DBQFAhzhoSvjcx4uv21sRAstKAJ9fIE+Fa+pWqk+L9FntKP7Gc49f4ACffHWb
jJiBt/eY1gOCgo+1n02P9to=
=l71j
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
This list is provided as an unmoderated internet service by Networked
Knowledge Systems (NKS). Views and opinions expressed in messages
posted are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
official policy or position of NKS or any of its employees.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 16:38:18 EDT