I bought my father an older Toshiba laptop about 4-5 years back.
It was running Windows XP, Celeron M processor, 256meg of ram.
About every six months the computer would be totally demolished with virus and spyware problems, no matter what I told my father. I had all updates in place, and anti-virus programs.
I re-imaged the drive for about the 4th time this year, and the hard drive finally quit. I put a new WD 80GIG IDE HDD in there, and threw another 512meg RAM stick at it.
I installed a copy of Ubuntu Linux on it, with most of their software suite.
My dad loves it, it is a much more modern OS than Windows Xp, and we don’t have to deal with the bullshit of viruses at all.
If you have some parents that are 50+ years old that don’t really do much on a computer but internet and word, then this is totally the no brainer thing to do.
I haven’t used linux in a few years, and I was surprised that I installed it and did not have one driver problem. I even plugged in a brother laser printer, and it worked right away.
i just had a lady come in and ask me to take ubuntu off and install XP, because she thought having it made her a nerd… and she was positive that she WASN’T a nerd and so it had to go. lol
i just installed ubuntu in order to try and save pics from my hd before i re-install xp (virus destroyed my drivers, had no internet connection, tons of reg errors, ect. it was bad, wouldnt ever rcognize a flash drive / extrenal hd)
but now im really liking it, i think im going to keep it. i was using firefox with windows for years before. for people running ubuntu, how do you torrent? run utorrent through wine? or is there a better linux based torrent program?
Def awesome for parents. Most people can’t understand it because of their comfortableness to Windows but if you only have a small knowledge and people are an open slate, its easier to get people used to. For systems management, just SSH in and change stuff for them.
I was about to make the switch on my laptop but I keep adding stuff to my “list of apps I need that Ubuntu doesn’t support”.
iTunes. I do way too much jailbreak stuff with my iphone to not have good backups and restores. Plus my wife uses itunes to sync her ipod touch.
Photoshop CS5. I don’t care what knockoffs you’re going to recommend, Photoshop is the standard and it’s what I use. Yeah, I can run CS5 portable through Wine but that’s crap.
VPN to work. We have a shitty Sonicwall firewall. I found a site about setting it up in Ubuntu and it looks like a PITA compared to installing the client and being done with it like I can in Windows.
Don’t be so quick to assume that. They messed something up in 10.04. I wasn’t able to get one of my IPSEC VPNs to connect.
Works perfect from command line, but fails to connect from network manager.
It’s always 2 steps forward and 1 step back with ubuntu.
edit: I should elaborate. I was able to get it to connect, but was unable to return any valid DNS requests. resolv.conf was getting the correct DNS servers, but they were unreachable.
