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On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 10:45 AM, Gordon Henderson <gordon+dcglug@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > So... The ever unfolding saga of trying to get my wife to use Linux > progresses... And yesterday she spent a couple of hours in-front of her PC > which I'd booted into Debian Squeeze running a fairly bog-standard install. > (ie. I've not done my tweaks with it to "tune" it at all!) It's running > Gnome. > > Her response was that it was a *lot* faster than XP! However, what she > really meant wasn't that it was faster overall, but that she could run more > applications at the same time and switch between them - something that seems > extremely "clunky" under XP. > > It wasn't all easy though - I installed FireFox4 and FlashPlayer - and for > this, I had to delve into command-line territory. I also installed > Thunderbird - although I did install that without the command-line, but > using the file-manager thing to un-pack the tar.gz, then create a launcher > to start it. However, I would not expect a non-geek to be able to do this, > and a .deb package for FireFox, flash and thunderbird would have been nice > (although to be fair, I didn't actually look for one, just used the download > links on the mozilla.org website) > > And, I was able to mount the NTFS partition and copy over her Thunderbird > profile lock-stock and theme and all, and then when we launched Thunderbird > under Linux it really did "just work". With her inboxes (she has 2 accounts, > both IMAP), themes, etc. all working. Didn't do the same for firefox, but > exported the bookmarks from XP and imported them into Linux land - that was > OK, and re-logging in to various web-sites & making a few settings wasn't a > big deal... > > So later today I'm going to look at the iPlayer and Citrix stuff that you've > pointed me to in the past. Will need to investigate it's standard PDF viewer > though and see what it's using. > > Other things I was impresed with - it found her USB printer and printed a > test page (It's an HP photo printer + scanner - not tried to scan with it > yet), and it found the network printer (HP Lasterjet). However while it > found the SAMBA server, it didn't find the home NFS server - which according > to google it ought to have, however a manual line in /etc/fstab sorted that > and I found a way to put an icon on the desktop to launch a file manager on > it. (I'm almost tempted to simply mount her home directory via NFS though - > however we only have 100Mb networking here and that might slow things down a > bit) > > It might have been harder had she been using Outlook or some other Email > system, however at least she's been using IMAP for ever. > > I didn't like the standard Gnome idea of using 2 "bars" for stuff - we > started by moving the bottom one to the right and the top one to the bottom, > but really want to lose one of them completely, so some adjusting will be > needed there. Although her monitor is 4:3, I think that in these days of > wide, short screens, we need all the vertical space we can get! To all the above - nice work :-) In terms of the standard gnome bars. In the preferences you can choose "show hide buttons" which I like. This lets you hide either of the panels. You can also "auto-hide" which personally i dont like. :-) roly -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq