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Cabrillo College Linux Classes • View topic - Looking for a distro even my mother can use...

Looking for a distro even my mother can use...

UNIX/Linux Installation & Configuration

Looking for a distro even my mother can use...

Postby jeff clark on Wed Oct 15, 2008 8:59 pm

I'm weaning myself off windows piece by piece and, with my growing linux skills, hope to eventually do the same for my mother, brother, and sister.

My mother's needs are basic: she doesn't understand what an operating system is and uses her computer almost exclusively for surfing the net and reading email, though has started playing with google earth. Runs XP, not that she knows it...

Brother surfs, emails, and creates digital videos with his canon camera, edits them, & uploads to youtube. He also plays Medal of Honor, has become a google earth fanatic, and has a basic understanding of file management under XP.

Sister & her husband surf, email, write papers an make lists in Word, burn disks of music and videos, and manage photos. They're using a factory install of Vista on an HP.

My mother's thinking of buying new machine to replace her laptop, my brother's always up for new things, my sister & brother-in-law want to learn more about virtual machines, and all are (or will be) running Core 2 Duo CPUs, so it seems like the time is ripe for all of them. I'm wondering if anyone else in the group has considered the same thing & if so, what distro? So far, Mandriva and OpenSuse seem to have the most polished look and feel for someone used to windows. Jonathan had good things to say about Mandriva early on, and I'll be installing itafter the (first) final to see what it's like...
jeff clark
 
Posts: 26
Joined: Tue Sep 02, 2008 7:11 pm
Location: Santa Cruz

Re: Looking for a distro even my mother can use...

Postby Jonathan Simms on Wed Oct 15, 2008 9:42 pm

Jeff,

I had a cousin of mine come over the other day and when I showed her OpenSUSE running on my computer she said that it looked like Vista. I have found that there needs to be a bridge between geeking out at the command line for us UNIX types and everyday surfing and stuff that makes computers enjoyable to use when you don't feel like using the left side of your brain. I have found that OpenSUSE is enjoyable to use; you will have to download any win32 codecs, which are available as a link off the OpenSUSE wiki, and of course using YaST is really easy. Mandriva is nice and could be a fairly good replacement although having used it I do have some complaints and I have also heard criticism of Mandriva although they do not directly fall into the sphere of casual usage. There is also the old stalwart Ubuntu. Actually I was reading an article dated from October 10th that wikipedia is running their servers exclusively on Ubuntu now.

I did a little research and found two Linux distros that may aid in the ease of migration, they are:

Xandros: http://www.xandros.com/ which isn't free but I thought I'd just mention it.
Linux XP: http://www.linux-xp.com/ and you can either download, or buy. http://www.linux-xp.com/get/
It is kind of funny how they have to sell the "replacement" Linux distros 'cause of the people who are so used to "getting what they paid for."

Also, on a side note, there is ReactOS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS http://www.reactos.org/en/index.html ReactOS is not a Linux distro however it is free and it is attempting to be binary compatible with Windows 2000 and later. It is a Windows-like OS. Might be beneficial in helping to further the notion that an operating system can be free and also be functional for users. More info on ReactOS here: http://neosmart.net/blog/2006/reactos-t ... -windows// Gallery: http://neosmart.net/gallery/v/os/ROS/

Hope this helps.

Jonathan.
Jonathan Simms
 
Posts: 119
Joined: Tue Sep 02, 2008 7:11 pm

Re: Looking for a distro even my mother can use...

Postby jeff clark on Fri Oct 17, 2008 12:08 am

Thanks for the links. Since I'll ultimately be acting as helpdesk support as well as install tech, I need something I'm willing to run on my own desktop and am familiar with. For that reason I'm looking for a mainstream distro that's free (cost) and under current development by the opensource community.

What issues did you have with Mandriva? I've installed it in a VM & the only thing that bothers me so far is that they want to sell me stuff...
jeff clark
 
Posts: 26
Joined: Tue Sep 02, 2008 7:11 pm
Location: Santa Cruz

Re: Looking for a distro even my mother can use...

Postby Jonathan Simms on Fri Oct 17, 2008 1:36 am

I don't really have too many complaints about Mandriva. I guess the thing that irritates me most is that firefox will close randomly while I'm surfing and that can get really annoying if it happens too often so I don't know if that's something that is unique to my installation or if there is something else going on. Any other review of Mandriva can been discovered through a simple google search. Also Mandriva doesn't come with perl, gcc or kernel-devel which won't matter much to most however those are necessary for installing VMware. All in all Mandriva is good for surfing, watching videos, sending e-mail; usual stuff.

If you are looking for a distro that is widely used and well supported DistroWatch.com lists all the major distros by rank. I think that you will find that all the top players compete to have similar features. I would check out and test OpenSUSE, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Linux Mint. I don't think you'll go wrong with any those distros as they all seem to be very focused on desktop implementation. Here's a link to Linux Mint: http://www.linuxmint.com/

I hope it turns out well.

Jonathan.
Jonathan Simms
 
Posts: 119
Joined: Tue Sep 02, 2008 7:11 pm

Re: Looking for a distro even my mother can use...

Postby jeff clark on Sat Oct 18, 2008 5:56 pm

Thanks, I forgot about distrowatch. Sometime after the final I'll be checking out 64 studio (http://64studio.com/), LinuxMint, and PCLinuxOS (http://www.pclinuxos.com/).
jeff clark
 
Posts: 26
Joined: Tue Sep 02, 2008 7:11 pm
Location: Santa Cruz


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