Ubuntu and My Dad
Well every year around Christmas or Thanksgiving while I am at my dad’s house. He usually wants me to work on his home computer. Tune it up fix windows, defrag the drive, update his Anti-Virus subscription, and just do a clean up and backup of the photos of the family they have put on the computer. Well a couple of weeks ago he started complaining about slowness on his computer (getting ready for the holiday ritual). I told him this year I was going to load Linux on his box instead. The 1st thing he asked was “Will I be able to read excel spreadsheets?” I told him “no problem” and if he didn’t like what Linux was doing for him I would rebuild his box and put windows back on it. Once I got behind his PC and started backing up files there wasn’t a single spreadsheet on it. Not sure why that was an issue for him.
Well mostly while checking out his computer I noticed he used IE and Outlook Express for his email. He had no bookmarks in his IE and his Outlook Express had been misconfigured for a while to where he could receive emails but not send them. I went to HowtoForge and they had a great write up on how to convert users Outlook to Mozilla Thunderbird. So files were backed up and his email settings were saved I loaded up Ubuntu Gutsy on his PC. After doing a couple of tweaks to the machine like Auto Login to his account and getting rid of the brown background. I puled in his email and setup some bookmarks in his new Firefox browser. I also loaded OpenSSH and set him up with a dyndns account this way I can support it from the road where ever I am at.
My dad took off on a huntin’ trip this week so he hasn’t gotten any real time behind the PC. I have seen my step mom has powered it up. I loaded Pidgin at startup and set him up with a gmail account so I can chat with them. But once he gets back I plan on doing one or two quick classes and we should be styling then. I will post updates later.
