Mom’s the last to migrate

May 22, 2007 on 10:22 am | In Computing |

Last weekend my mom’s old TARGA laptop (PIII, 800MHz, 128MB RAM) said good-bye to Windows 2000 and hello to Xubuntu. Win 2000 wasn’t doing the trick for a while already since it was old, slow, and the weakest link in our homenetwork’s security. Now mom can surf the web and check her mail safely again plus she hardly notices any difference as I had her already use Firefox and Thunderbird in Windows.

This migration is also a good example on how the user perspective differs from the admin’s:

My mom doesn’t like the scrolling kernel messages when Xubuntu boots. Obviously she doesn’t care about the argument that those messages pinpoint you towards the source of the error in case anything went wrong - unlike in Windows. Well, I’ll check if I can implement a nice booting screen.
The second thing she didn’t like was my inability to migrate her statistics of successful completions in Windows’ Freecell that she was proud of. My comment: Duh.
Last but not least she isn’t thrilled about Gnome’s set of icons, especially the Exit Door gives her trouble. Just confirms what Sanders & McCormick have found out quite a while ago already.

From my point of view, it was sort of nasty that Xubuntu refused to install GRUB. Since the installation was almost over, I canceled it and added GRUB manually with the help of this thread. As it turned out, the cancellation also inhibited any user from being created. Since Xubuntu doesn’t know a root user like all the other Ubuntu flavors, I finally had a fully working system at my fingertips that I wasn’t able to use. Booting a life CD, chrooting into the Xubuntu installation and creating a user did the trick, though.

A long story made short: for the everyday user, a desktop Linux works like a charm. For its installation, however, it still takes advanced users (and I’m not talking of the newsstand “Secret Windows Functions discovered! How to build your own Vista for free!”-type of advanced user).