I noticed an item in passing on lwn.net, and thought I should expound here on a recent experience with a client. He has a Pentium/3 at his store that came with Win98, which has had to have Windows re-installed several times (I know, he calls me in to do that) and a Pentium/4 at home with Windows XP. Other than being rather meddlesome in what he is doing, he likes XP enough to leave it alone. Both machines have DSL links to the Internet. After the second last Win98 blowout, he told me to also put Linux on the machine, and he would poke at it to see if he felt comfortable with it. I had RedHat 7.3 CDs available, so I used those (the box has an NVidia card, so I hoped that would avoid needing the separate NVidia module.) For those on the list, that was the time I was asking about clearing a BIOS password. He liked what he saw of Linux, except for RedHat's mailings of security fix notices, but other than the day I installed it, RedHat would not work with the DSL connection - looking over the scripts, it was trying to execute a file of configuration settings that was obviously not executable, following one security update (whoops!) After Win98 blew out again, he had it, he wanted to go strictly Linux. I could not find a fix for the RedHat DSL problems, so I pulled out my Debian Woody CDs, got him up and back online, and now do the bulk of his system administration from my system over ssh. He has had three glitches in that time: 1) Wanda the Gnome Fish didn't work - I'd forgotten to install fortune. 2) Netscape and Mozilla (he had used both on Win98 and XP) would hang if he tried to mail a link to someone - my goof, I'd set Mozilla mail up to import his address book and when specifying the outgoing server, I'd said that of his ISP, along with the account name and password. Turns out that the ISP uses only the account name and IP address for granting relay permission on the mail server, and the password effectively hangs the conversation between the sender program and the mail server. I didn't have exim configured at that time, or I would have sent it through the local server. 3) When he was flipping power breakers for the lights a couple nights ago, he hit the one for the computer by mistake. Not having a UPS on the machine yet there, it went down after 30 days uninterupted running from the reboot after installation. The system, however, thinks that Lilo is a virus, and throws up an error message from the BIOS that keeps automatic recovery from proceeding (Grub with RedHat didn't cause that problem, so I'll probably switch it over when I get the time to stick my nose into it.) He likes how the system handles most of the headaches for him, on a smaller memory footprint, even with Gnome. He loves the fact that his dog, who is at the store whenever he is, now has his own email address. He has called me a couple of times asking for where the dialog or menu is to make a change in Evolution, and is impressed at how much more simply many of these things can be done than with Outlook. He is looking forward for me to get imap working (just involves me getting time to set it up) so that he can check his email from home. He did take an "Okay, it's a computer, what do I do with it? 101" course when he first got this machine, but he found the migration to Linux not simply painless, but pain-relieving. Most of the calls I've had from him about one question or another have been of the "What program do I need to read xls files?" genre, or "The menu says that I can open this with Acrobat, xpdf or Gnome-gv - what should I use?" Beyond that, for his needs, it just plain works. Well. Intuitively. With luck, in six months time, he will forget what Ctrl-Alt-Del does outside of NT/XP ;) And me? From my system, I can fix problems and quirks before he sees them, I apply security upgrades when I get the notice, and I can tinker with a less loaded system than my own that is otherwise set as being strictly stable, without paying for the hardware ;) He had been talking of replacing that box in the summer, but now I get the impression that he may want a Linux system for his home instead, and start playing with vnc and vpn (not that he knows them by those names - he is just intrigued by the idea of running applications on one machine but seeing them on another.) -- Mark L. Kahnt, FLMI/M, ALHC, HIA, AIAA, ACS, MHP ML Kahnt New Markets Consulting Tel: (613) 531-8684 / (613) 539-0935 Email: kahnt@hosehead.dyndns.org
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