I nearly fell off my chair!

Nice blog!

Cheers;
Ed

I’m in the process of trying to find a dedicated Linux comp as well, preferably a laptop.

There’s some more Linux posts here, if you want to check them out

http://www.zmogo.com/tag/year-of-linux/

So, now, I’ve grown a bit with friend Ubu, learned how to network it, and eventually shifted my whole house to a networked Ubuntu Linux environment (both wired and wireless!). Friends just love it when they drop by, and realize I haven’t lost anything (made gains, in fact, and, no “Mama M$” looking over my shoulder or thru my webcam!) from the change.

My most recent addition is a brand-new Acer Aspire 5515 laptop (bargain!), purchased last Thursday, from which I completely wiped Winderz Vista Home Basic, and did a fresh install of Ubuntu 8.10 “Intrepid Ibex.” It dropped right into my network and does everything I ask of it — including this comment. That only took a day. Winderz would have needed over 3 days to get where I needed or wanted it — and in comes pre-installed…

Cheers;
the0wl

My problems come when their grandkids see Linux and want it on their computers, they are the lazy ones, they don’t want to read anything follow instructions, they just want to point and click. They think that’s what computers are all about, they don’t want to learn new things, They are MS brain washed, controlled into using computers the MS way and nothing else, problem solving is not their idea of using computers, that’s to much like work for them to do.

This issue has been addressed in Ubuntu, which is the Linux distribution you show in your photo. For example, the default video player is Totem, but is labeled as “Movie Player”, and Firefox is the web browser, and it’s labeled “Internet”, Nautilus is called “File Browser”, etc.

If it still does not work (especially for existing documents), Open a document, Press F11 to open the style dialog, Right click the style “Default” and navigate to the tab Fonts. Then select the language to any one that have a check sign in the font.

I am in Canada so I have the same problem. Let me know if you still have problem.

Cheers!
NawaMan

I’ve enjoyed your writing quite a bit. I’m not overwhelmed by the lack of actual comparison or the failure in the conclusion to apply the reality that it was all done half-arsed.

Everything I do is from within a Linux environment

Video editing – including for competitions

Photo editing and graphic art work

Thesis writing and research – installing dictionaries for the spell checker is as simple as going to the toolbar and finding ‘install new dictionaries’

Fun things like Celestia, Kstars, GoogleEarth

The notion that Linux is good for ‘web-browsing’ and light weight things is simply a throw-away bit of inaccurate and misleading fluff.

I’ve installed Linux for other people and they’ve been able to do significantly more, for less ($$) without the eternal concerns about upgrades etc.

More so, other hardware that does not have drivers for Vista (or sometimes even XP) has run perfectly well on friends’ Linux machines (eg. scanners).

Now, a blog I’d like to see is: “My grandma installed a Linux, Windows and Mac OS from scratch”, particularly if she’d not used any OS with regularity.

Give her $500 and ask her to buy an OS and a list of parts so you can build her a machine (monitor, keyboard etc – could be second hand!) and see how she goes.

Then build the machine for her (is there a problem there Mac? Sorry Windows, your specs are a little on the low side there) and ask her to install the OS.

Then when she’s finished, see how she goes doing anything at all with it.

Now that’d be fascinating.

@AndrejaKo: I didn’t know that file extensions were irrelevant in Linux! you learn something new every comment!

I’m going to continue with this series in a weekly format, beginning on Friday. So if you want to, stay tuned!

I use 8.10.
Open OpenOffice and type misspelled text. Then go to Service->Language->All text
and select English. That is it. Works like a charm. Look at your screen shot – no language selected.

I jumped to Ubuntu when it first came out and it was my first time using Linux. I cannot tell you how many friends I have who know nothing about computers have also made this jump on their own with no problems.

It’s so abundantly clear that throughout this process you’ve attempted to do things the “Windows” or “OSX” way jumping in cocksure and headstrong when there is, indeed, and easy Linux way so long as you were willing to Google it first. I didn’t realize that people were so adverse to saying, “How do I install nvidia video drivers in Ubuntu?” into a search engine. That would have brought up hundreds of responses all of which would have presented you with the easy, built in, straight forward way that has not failed me in 4 years of Ubuntu use and has even gotten better. Unless you have literally the most recent Nvidia processors that had some trouble, you’re supported. ATI is supported as well and now the process is nearly identical to installing the Nvidia stuff.

Compiz has 0 connection to KDE. Complex effects didn’t work on either setup because you never installed your video card.

Wine is nothing like a replacement for VMWare or Virtual Box, and if you go to : http://appdb.winehq.org/ you’ll find a list detailing thousands of Windows program, how well they run in Wine, and any changes you need to make to your Wine configuration so that it runs better.

I know you didn’t want to have to do any work and wanted to plow through as naively as possible, but truly, had you simply taken a little time to read as you were trying new things or read a bit before hand, the same way you would have done researching any new product, I don’t think you would have run into half the difficulties you did.

Perhaps you were trying to self-sabotage a bit in order to have a more fun article, but more often than not I read about problems that make me want to cringe because they were so easily avoidable.