Roy Schestowitz wrote:
Ubuntu for your parents, uncles and aunts. No tech support anymore!
,----[ Quote ]
| During my visit to India last month, I promised myself that I
| would accomplish one important task. I would do everything in my
| power to eliminate the tech support role that I was playing to my
| parents. You see, my parents had inherited (ah, sweet pun) a desktop
| computer from me and in my absence had taken the help of local young
| men who gleefully installed Microsoft Windows software (pirated, of
| course). Pirated software, you must realize, is like getting a newp
| air of shoes with godawful bugs in them. They bite and you can'ta
| sk for help from the seller or go to a qualified doctor. My parents,
| like many parents whose wards have ridden the software wave, aren't
| so bad off. They've got free tech support. I intensely dislike having
| to support crappy software. I was determined to solve this
| problem.
|
| [...]
|
| So there you have it. The above is only a broad overview of what I did.
| There's a lot of technical details I did not go into. If you are thinking
| of using Ubuntu, go for it, the problems are easily solved. I repeated the
| same for my brother-in-laws parents and they are happily using Ubuntu now.
| Some useful links below.
`----
http://scienceblogs.com/thescian/2006/11/ubuntu_for_your_parents_uncles.php
http://tinyurl.com/yetga2
When I lived at home I could easily support the family's tech needs, but
when I joined the Army that was a whole different ball game, I would
come home once a month and sure enough every other visit I spent a good
portion undoing what my younger (step) brothers and sister had done to
the computer.
I eventually broke them off and my dad resorted to just reinstalling
from scratch every 3 months. 3 months before I left for Iraq I set him
up with Fedora Core and installed games and setup his email account.
At first he was too scared to touch it so breaking it wasn't even the
question, but now he's wondered why he never made the switch along time ago.
Once a system is setup, it's easy as pie to maintain, especially since
running simple programs doesn't require "GOD MODE" accounts which allow
the user to destroy the system.
Charles~
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