[ILUG] My Aunt Tilly

[albiondave]

Niall O Broin wrote:
> I don't actually have one, but I do have an elderly aunt who had an old 
> Gateway P75 whose hard disk has recently died. This has been replaced by 
> the cheapest thing Dell offered which of course is so much faster than 
> her old PC, it's just not funny.
> 
> Muggins here got lumped with procuring and installing same and having 
> done so, I installed assorted adware fighters, and whatever firewall 
> trial package was provided with it. She recently asked me about the end 
> of the trial package and I told her that she would have to pony up 80 
> EUR (and that per annum) to carry on using it and frankly, with a 
> Windows box, it's a necessity rather than a luxury.
> 
> And then the penny dropped. This woman uses her PC to send email, to do 
> a little web surfing, and to write the odd letter - nothing else, and 
> there's certainly no requirement for any exotic Windows only software.
> 
> So, I think I'll make her my Aunt Tilly experiment. I'm not going to ask 
> her to install Linux, but she is going to use it. She is a retired 
> secondary school teacher, so is not exactly clueless but as far as 
> computers are concerned she is completely clueless.
> 
> I'm more or less settled on SuSE 9.1 as the distribution, for the simple 
> reason that I use it in a number of places, and I have media available. 
> I'm open to persuasion as to a better distribution but to be honest, 
> there'd have to be a pretty compelling reason. After all, this PC is 
> going to run Mozilla (for web and email) and Open Office, and that is it 
> - it hardly matters what distribution I use.
> 
> A possible dark skinned person in the combustible material is hardware - 
> I've no idea what graphics hardware is in this box, but as it's current 
> Dell hardware it's entirely possible that there's no XFree support for 
> it. Also, the modem is very likely (no - absolutely guaranteed) to be a 
> Winmodem. I've no idea if it's a model for which there is Linux support, 
> and TBH I don't want this Linux experiement to cost any money in the 
> form of a new modem, though I most likely have a real modem around 
> somewhere which I could give her.
> 
> I'll be sure to keep you updated on her progress.
> 
> 
> 
> Niall
> 
(A possible dark skinned person in the combustible material is hardware)

come on now please
       albion dave