ubuntu for a neophyte?

[Tony Arnold]

Colin,

Colin Brace wrote:

> Has anyone had any experience installing Ubuntu for people without any
> PC experience, ie, your grandmother? And I mean absolutely zippo.

Yes, I recently installed a PC for my mother who is in her mid
seventies. Her only experience with computers was along time ago at work
and then she only used a character based application, so she had zero
knowledge of windows or the mouse.

I chose to put Ubuntu on her machine because as she had no experience it
seemed it would not matter what system she learnt. Also, it was zero
cost and any apps she would need would zero cost too. Finally, as she
live just under 300 miles away, I wanted a system I could easily manage
remotely. (I use ssh to connect and command line to manage).

Her use of the machine is quite limited. Web browsing, Google mail, oh
and she likes the games that come with Gnome! My brother briefly
introduced her to Open Office recently, but she has little use for this
and without a printer it's not much use.

> I can think of various reasons pro; just wondering what the cons are,
> what potential problems I should try to anticipate.

The cons in my situation are mainly to do with her living so far away.
Talking her through some tricky steps to solve problems is quite
tedious. (The hardest was when I sent her a new wireless router after
the first one failed, but that was more to do with the router than
Ubuntu). But her main obstacle was learning to use the mouse! It took
her a few weeks to get proficient with it. It was only then we taught
her to double click!

The other real con is that she was thinking of taking some courses being
run at her local library for new users to PCs. Inevitably, these courses
all use Windows and finding Linux based equivalent courses is
impossible. There is no LUG nearby either, so getting local help is
quite difficult too.

Having said that, the system has needed almost no administration from me
since I set it up. I set it to automatically install updates and I've
had to fix a frozen X server on occasions.

I've also set up accounts on the machine for other members of the
family, knowing that their work won't interfere with each other.

Regards,
Tony.
-- 
Tony Arnold, IT Security Coordinator, University of Manchester,
IT Services Division, Kilburn Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL.
T: +44 (0)161 275 6093, F: +44 (0)870 136 1004, M: +44 (0)773 330 0039
E: tony.arnold at manchester.ac.uk, H: http://www.man.ac.uk/Tony.Arnold