[olug] New Linux User (long)

[Eric Penne]

My own little installfest in Cedar Rapids, Iowa today went well.

A friend of mine is a single father of an 11 year old daughter in a
household with no PC at all.  He started back to school this week to
get his bachelors in business but couldn't afford a brand spanking new
computer.

His requirements were:
word processor
internet browser

He also wanted:
printer
MP3 compression
CD burner
USB MP3 player support
Digital camera support

He said he wasn't a gamer.

His parents gave him a old HP P2 233MHz PC with Win 98 and I told him
there wasn't anything I could do with it to make it useful to him.
His daughter or he would kill it with viruses and spyware in a matter
of minutes if it was connected to the internet.  It was also horribly
slow so I would have to reinstall Win98 to make it useful.

Another friend priced out a budget box for around $400 that he said
would kick ass for him.  It definitely would have worked well and he
said he could afford it.  In past conversations with him though I had
heard him say, "I got my paycheck and I'm still in the hole." so I
figured it was worth a shot to see if we could pull in something
cheaper.  My sis-in-law in Omaha had an Emachine P3 1GHz sitting
around with WinXP so I took it home and set it up with all the
requisite software to keep the bad stuff off of it.  I still figured I
would have a lot of work to keep it up though but he uses WinXP at
work so I thought it would be easier on him and it met all of his
requirements and wants.  It was a little slow and low on memory
(128MB) so I bumped it up to 384MB with available PC133 SIMMs I had
available which sped it up and made it bearable. I was going to take
this EMachine over there today but last night it coughed and sputtered
and I didn't think it was stable enough to give to him.  Now I'm back
at square 1.

I had mentioned linux to him before and he had given me a good ribbing
about being a geek with this stuff.  All of my PCs run linux either
Xubuntu or Kubuntu.  They have little glitches here and there that I
don't have any problems working around but a newbie would throw it
out.

A couple of weeks ago I went to a place to get some memory in Walford,
Iowa called Midwest Computer Brokers or something like that
http://mcbia.com and noticed a couple of cheap computers.  Not just a
couple but a whole stack of  Dell GX240 P4 1.8GHz 512MB RAM 20GB HD
ATI Rage128 AGP card for $85 without OS.  We dug through them and
found one with a CDRW.  I told myself it was time to bite the bullet
and purchased one for him.  I spent about 3 hours today downloading
(800-950KB/s) Kubuntu 7.04 and installing it and all the software that
I could think of that he wanted.  The install went flawlessly.  It was
amazing.  No glitches, no work arounds, no hassle.

Tonight I took it over to his house to test it out.  I found out he
had a generic Audiovox MP3 player, HP officejet 600, and Canon digital
camera.  We plugged them in and they worked.  Again, no hassle, no
glitches, no workarounds.  Digikam for the camera. Amarok for the MP3
player.  HPLIP for the printer.  I told him the scanner probably
wouldn't work and that he'd be lucky if the printer itself worked.  I
was worried about the printer but the HP utility found it and
installed the driver then printed a test page.  The black ink was
dried out but the color cartridge worked well.  The utility even gave
the option to scan and fax.  That was when I realized I had messed up
and I didn't install the scanner or fax software since it wasn't on
the required or wanted lists.  I also didn't have a clue what printer
he had from his parents until I got there.

He then asked about ripping his CD collection so I popped in one of
his CDs and realized mistake #2.  I had installed the MP3 decoder but
didn't install the MP3 compression.  Amarok still started playing the
CD so he was happy with it.  I told him that I'll bring the install CD
over or if we can find an internet connection we'll just download the
software.

He was impressed with the system.  I showed him all of the programs
like OO.org, K3B, Amarok, DigiKam, Konqueror, Firefox, games, etc..
Right away he snagged a pic from his camera and set it as his
background.  It met all of his needs and wants and ran smoothly.  I
was flabbergasted, why didn't I just start with this system instead of
dicking around with Win XP on that EMachine for so long.  Hopefully
his daughter won't have any problems with it.  I installed Kopete in
case she develops the IM addiction.

He wrote me a check for $85 and I was off.  I'm sure he'll have lots
of questions but I'm thinking about getting one of those little
machines for myself now.  He's thinking about buying an LCD monitor
and wireless keyboard since he didn't even spend $100 on the PC.

I told him that he has a computer much faster than anything I have.
My fastest PC is a P3 1GHz laptop.  He asked me how a geek like me
could get away with such an old PC.  I told him it was because of my
meager requirements (no gaming) and linux.  Sure I've added RAM (1GB)
to my desktop machine (Duron 700MHz) and a new video card (ATI 9600)
with hardware MPEG decompression to offload some of the work from the
processor but in the last 7 years with that desktop I've only put
about $100 into it.

It was a good day.

Eric Penne