Mom now uses Ubuntu

An old Acer (laptop), that was non so cutting edge when new and is now lacking Wi-Fi and space key (and other features!), needed some clean up. In these cases the first thing to remove is Windows XP, of course, and I installed Ubuntu 8.10.

Things went almost perfectly: each piece of still-working-hardware was recognized, but some problem with the mother board halts the PC when shutting down.
Beside this a stable, human and clear desktop was ready. Some benefits of Ubuntu for really beginners like mum:

1. Mum started immediately to surf the Internet without problems (Firefox is always Firefox ), probably at first didn’t realized she was using a completely different Operating System.
2. The default installation comes with OpenOffice and several essential minor programs (PDF reader, ZIP archiver…).
3. Set it and forget it: it’s easy to automate photo download from camera (with F-Spot), MP3 player managment etc. In particular I liked the fixed mountpoint (e.g.: /media/nikon/) instead of a random available drive letter (e.g.: H: today, E: tomorrow…).
4. Your favourite places allow you to easily browse documents and other relevant positions, without having to care which partition or drive you are actually writing in… (/home/user/documents and /home/user/photos could be – and are – on different partitions!)
5. Remote desktop. In case of troubles… it’s amazingly easy to open a remote session VNC-like.

Being quite an old PC, I disabled unnecessary desktop effects and tryied lighter software. For terminal emulators I came up with interesting alternatives.

Now it’s time to learn some GNU/Linux, mom

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