<3 Gaming

It has been a few weeks now since I rolled out Ubuntu on my in-law’s new computer. Not a single phone call has been made to me yet about… well, anything. As the saying goes, no news is good news.

I’m calling the operation a success. When I actually asked them what they thought of Ubuntu the only comment was that it was pretty similar to Windows XP, minus the fact that their “My Documents” folder moved… pretty trivial.

Now the challenge is going to be how to figure out an automated process for maintaining the thing from home. SSH go!

Life continues to be busy. However most of that business is self created. I recently resubscribed to WoW, and when I haven’t been playing that I have been watching re-runs of House on USA playing catch up. Hurray for coming into a series late! However one of my recent endeavors involved setting my in-laws up with their new computer… read on if you dare!

I should probably explain that I am an avid user of both Ubuntu and FreeBSD on my home computers. In fact out of the five computers running in my home I have one Windows PC and it exists solely for gaming (<3). I even made my wife switch over to using Ubuntu since she does nothing but browse the web, check her email and chat on instant messenger. She actually enjoys using it by the way. Where does the experiment come in? Ah yes, the in-laws. They for the most part never use their computer for anything except the same tasks my wife does mentioned above. Throw in some word processing and a bit of mp3 listening and viola you have the total sum of computer activities that occur in their household (when I am not there :p).

After replacing a router, failing to get a printer to print and realizing that there was an issue with the rebooting process on the hardware I finally got everything up to my satisfaction… minus the printing. I showed my father in-law around the system, told him how to find basic stuff, left the little help menu on the task bar and made the system resemble XP’s layout as much as I could without doing major changes. He seemed to find it either as adequate and interesting, particularly the multiple desktop feature.

Now the experiment has begun, we are approaching the close of week one of in-law Ubuntu conversion and my phone hasn’t rung once yet with a problem or question. Hopefully they will find it just as useable and if things go well I will plan on converting the entire family! Mwa fwa fwa fwa…

In all seriousness though I think that Linux is particularly a great solution to the basic computer users like my wife or in-laws who share this simple feature set. It is also great to not have to deal with the anti-virus and spyware issue (yes they may exist but its rare to find them). The other added bonus is that remote administration became a hell of a lot more easier for me. I will probably follow up in a couple months just to let everyone (aka the 2 people reading this) know how Linux actually works out for them.