While my employer officially likes that other OS, I have been able to install GNU/Linux on a few of the employer’s machines that had no legal OS or no way to restore the OS. I have also installed GNU/Linux on a couple of machines brought to me to see if I could fix them. One had hardware problems and files missing that could not be replaced and the other was ME and I could not install either of two versions of the driver for a nice printer from the manufacturer’s site. GNU/Linux had a driver, but the installation was difficult. I had to figure out a udev.rules script… I could not, but finally, I realized that I had placed the rule out of position and needed it to be higher priority to get it working. Voila!
This is a community with about 200 homes, so a few boxes is a few % or more of GNU/Linux usage! Students have been using GNU/Linux in the lab so they are not hesitant at all. If the choice comes down to not working or GNU/Linux, the decision is swift.
The problems of that other OS are many. Folks here often have a PC at home to rip CDs and to play music. They do not have Internet access at home sometimes and the system cannot phone home or download a driver. Freight would be about $200 for a round-trip to Winnipeg, or $100 to Thompson and some repairs could easily reach $100. There are a lot of PCs in the dump, I am told. It is chearper to buy a new one rather than to repair one. So GNU/Linux is a green movement in Shamattawa. PCs can last longer with it. That other OS is not sufficiently flexible to be viable in this place. GNU/Linux is very modular and flexible and can work anywhere.
I think an Install Fest would be fun after Christmas. By then news of the installations should have spread by word-of-mouth and success or failure determined. I have had no complaints yet. I take that as good news. FUD! It is hard to blank out all the shrill screams protesting that GNU/Linux is not ready for the desktop. 
On Monday, I have a plan to install LAMP on a local box for the Band Office. They need databases to keep track of things. I will try to do the installation in class both to show students how easy it is and also to give lessons appropriate for two of my current courses, Data Collection and Analysis and Interactive Websites. By making the databases available on a web server, the Band can use web browsers on any platform to manage the database and, eventually, appropriate content can be made available to the public. I hope the PC they bring over has a gigabit/s NIC. That is fun. Otherwise, I may have to sing and dance a few minutes longer. A base install is way less than a gigabyte, so I could do this in 20 minutes or so. No KDE/GNOME. Just LAMP. I can install a few PHP scripts for demonstrations and perhaps one will be useful for the intended purposes. Otherwise we will have to use phpMyAdmin as a general purpose interface and possibly use it to generate queries for a draft of a script.
I expect a simple installation could be done in one class and after the Band has refined their requirements/specification, it will require a bit of development. Students will be able to do some of it or at least see how it is done. We have about three weeks of a half-course left, so there is not much time for them to work on it. I will have a better idea of the scope of the project next week.
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Good luck with your Linux progress – one machine at a time.
I got started with Linux a year and a half ago when I installed Ubuntu on my daughter’s old desktop she used in grad school. She and her husband bought a new XP machine in 2004 and the Y2k era Dell Dimension 4100 was gathering dust in my basement.
Since then I’ve probably refurbished 10 Pentium IIIs, Celerons and AMD K6s from 1999-2001 and given them to folks in my town (Almonte ON) who didn’t have a computer. Linux is the only solution for security, safety and support for these old machines.
Most of them just needed additional RAM to work great. Xubuntu Dapper Drake is my distro of choice – no problems with old graphics hardware.
Recently I upgraded my own main desktop to an Athlon 64 X2 based system, and it is Linux only.
Just blew away another XP installation. The other XP machines work well but this one kept crashing every time I re-installed. It crashed within a few days and kept crashing every few minutes after that. I suspect the same person was surfing to the same site and bringing in the same malware… So, I installed Debian Etch. It took 20 minutes for local file copying and 2 hours for security updates from the web. Our ISP is so slow… The box has been running solidly for a week now, so I guess it was not a hardware problem.
The much-pronounced user-friendliness of that other OS is not evident here. Many intelligent but non-geek types get into constant troubles only solved by re-installing or tedious file scanning. One lady brought in her XP machine yesterday, fearing it was owned. It was an M$ pop-up advising her to update security. One-care had “expired”. Sigh. More time wasted on nothing of value. I told her I had not seen malware on GNU/Linux in 8 years. Enough said. She will get one-care working but I have planted a seed. The next time her system causes her stress she will remember.
Another fellow bought a new HP laptop. Cool. Vista. Not cool. It did not help that he forgot his password. I used SystemRescueCD to clear it for him. He sees me use GNU/Linux every day at school and now he knows GNU/Linux is needed to fix that other OS. He may eventually catch on to using GNU/Linux. He forgot what I told him when he went shopping, did not ask for XP and did not decline the EULA. Sigh. He got a good price for the laptop. It would have been sweeter if he had declined the EULA and gone to GNU/Linux but he was too impatient.
There is still a lot of Penguin phobia out there, unfortunately.
My wife works as a volunteer in a local thrift shop (that’s where I get my used PCs to recycle.) One of her co-workers was looking for a second PC for her grand-daughter whose desktop had died.
I had her husband call me and offered him free a Compaq Presario 5360 I have in my basement now. It’s ready to go with 320 MB of RAM and Xubuntu 6.06 installed and configured.
He turned it down because he didn’t think his grand-daughter would like Linux and the machine was a little old to install XP. Not that either of them had ever tried a Linux desktop. Sigh.
I find my best clients are people who never had a PC at all before and so don’t have Microsoft pre-conditioning.
Pity. I have kids from Grade 1 to Grade 10 using Debian/GNOME here and they have no problems with the interface. It is a GUI. What problems could there be? Free, eh? 320MB? Who cares what the system is if the OS and app are loaded. Anything made in the last 30 years is way faster than any human.
This story has a happy ending.
I just gave the whole system away to a developmentally delayed young man whose parents are too poor to afford a computer for him. Now he can use it to keep in touch with friends via email. We installed some Linux games for him as well. he’s happy.
I had a student a few years back. Going blind. Got him a 21″ monitor on a GNU/Linux box. Wow! He went from hating school to begin a regular attender and connected to the world. It made a difference in his life. Let’s hope your gift makes a similar impact.
Soon, I plan to retire. One of the many projects I have in mind is to do what I do now as part of my job as charitable work with schools. Along with gardening and all that, I want to keep building powerful servers and using them to give new life to old/slow PCs in schools. The curriculum demands PCs in every classroom but schools cannot afford the high cost of maintaining thick clients. A couple thousand dollars worth of server and thin clients will make a difference for kids and make recycling PCs easier. Add a NIC, yank out drives, replace fans and they are good for another few years.
I have recently read a book, “Linux Thin Client Networks” by David Richards, the guy who switched Largo, FL to GNU/Linux on thin clients. There are amazing ideas in it about convincing people to change and getting the most out of the budget and the hardware. I have been using thin clients for years and I learned several tricks and implemented some already. Our new expansion will surely use a bunch of these ideas. I am writing a review of it for Free Software Magazine. I should finish that this weekend.