§ One Virus Too Many
So while my dad is reinstalling Windows after being wiped out by a virus that got by both IE 8 and McAfee I’m installing Fedora on an old HP I have lying around. My dad is gonna give Linux a try for a while. He’s fed up.
I figure its worth a shot. He wants at least one secure machine to keep financial and personal info on. Windows has been a long running pain in the ass. From one end to the other. He’ll be experiencing it on an old HP ePC 1.7Ghz with 1GB of Ram and an onboard ATI video chipset that feels like it wants to die. All in all, though, it should let him feel it out to see if he can deal with it or not. I think once he grasps the differences between it and Windows he’ll be fine. On top of that I think he’s gonna be blown away by the relative quality of the free software that he’ll get with Linux.
While I’d love to put him in a Mac I can’t justify telling him to spend that much money right now. He’s thinking about a new computer anyway and if he does a $750 Dell it’ll be a smoking machine, he can dual boot Linux and Windows 7 and he can have the best of both worlds (or, hopefully, just a Linux world 😉 ).
I think device compatibility will be the biggest deal. We’ll need to hook up a digital camera, a scanner and a printer. I’m not too worried about the printer, but the camera and scanner I’m not sure about. Fortunately I have the same scanner here I can test with before giving him the test machine. That’ll leave the camera as the only untested item. But, hey, testing is what this little experiment is about.
So, here we go: pushing the old man in to Linux. Whee!
Update 1: I’m pretty impressed. I’ve got the system almost ready to give him. I’ve confirmed that printing and scanning work. Not too shabby for just a few hours “work” on a system that I like to think I know more about than I do 😉
Tagged as: fedora linux test try windows
