I told you already of the French Remaster I made for my 82-year old neighbor - read it here - . Well, I knew it was only a matter time before his Win2K would run into trouble.
Two days ago, he informed me that he couldn't Skype anymore. The audio was gone, since his 13 year old grandson downloaded some game or some other piece of software last week-end. He asked me to come over and if possible fix it for him because other stuff didn't work as before.
I went over, with the PCLOS French Remaster under my arm and at first tried to revive the audio. Alas, nothing seemed to work. It is also worth mentioning that his box is an 8 year old IBM (P4-512 Mb) and finding the right audio drivers for this box seemed more an adventure than a search - locate - download - install I was expecting.
As I suspected malware or virus being involved, I asked him if he still wanted to give Linux a try and he said 'Why not', because he realized that once again I would have to reinstall his Win2K for the n-th time, and frankly I think that he was a little embarrassed about it.
So in went the CD. and I let the LiveCd boot. No joy... a video problem. Then I tried with the NoFB option and up came the video and I installed it without a problem in dual boot.
Every piece of hardware was detected without a problem. I apt-getted Skype and we were skyping in no time, mic and audio working. Then I installed his HP Laserjet 6P - which gave us quite a lot of problems under Win2K oddly enough - and we were printing in no time.
In all the years he had his PC, he never succeeded in playing a DVD movie. I apt-getted the libdvdccs2 and for the first time he watched a video on his IBM.
Then I remarked that his DVD player was a CD-Writer, which he didn't know. I popped over to my house, fetched some empty CD-R's and once back I burned all pictures from the Win2K My Pictures folder on a CD to show him his CD/R worked. Talking about those pictures, he said to me that he always had problems to download pictures from his tiny digital camera to the PC. The software that he had to use under Win2K was so complex that he didn't understand how to do it.
I showed him the magic of Linux and HAL. I plugged in the USB cable from his camera then switched it on and HAL asked me what I wanted to do. I selected 'Ouvrir dans une nouvelle fenêtre" (Open in a new Window) and we browsed through the folders to where the pictures were saved. It was only a simply Ctrl-A - Ctrl-C - Ctrl-V to have them transferred to the pictures folder on his Home folder.
Finally I tweaked some minor stuff like setting the default file format of OpenOffice to Word and Excel, auto-login and so on.
He was very happy with the way PCLinuxOS had expanded the possibilities of his IBM, like the viewing of DVD movies and the burning of CD-R/W.
And mostly that he didn't find it difficult at all to get used to KDE interface. He was a bit apprehensive at first, but the end result was very much to his liking.
Sunday, June 08, 2008
82 year old runs PCLinuxOS
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5 reactions:
This probably the best way to bring in people into linux world.
With kindness and grace. That's a great post. Enjoyed reading it. 10x.
Hey Oz,
txs for your comment.
At that age, doing secretary work for the WWII veterans, working with Word, Excel, Outlook and Skype under Windows... He's a tough one ;-)
So whenever I can help him out, I do it with much pleasure. And for him, the F1-key lives a few houses down the road. :-D
What a lovely service to provide for someone who provides a service to those heroes (and I usethat word advisedly) who had the courage to stand up and resist fascism.
Nice on!
Thanks for your really great help! I always believed in Linux, most especially in dire need.
I have similar results with my parents and family. The two distros I use for newbies is PCLinuxOS and Xubuntu for P2-3's. My parents are in their seventies, one 10 year Win user and the other a total newb.
As well, I do tech support for family using Linux which means another 8 computers (and it doesnt take me 5% of the time I used to spend on their Win boxens full of virus, trohans and rest) for people in their 60s.
I had my wife's aunt, who inherited a Mac from someone, tell me she felt more confortable on her sister's computer. So I dual booted her Mac and she runs Linux on it now :-)
Gnu-Linux is ready for grandparents, I've seen it enough times over the past year and a half.
Those who claim otherwise, can always ask my mom for tech support. She doesnt know what a command line is but she knows how to DL every game in the repositories!!
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