http://shop.canonical.com/ -> Click “Training”
http://shop.canonical.com/index.php?cPath=21 -> Click “Online Ubuntu Desktop Training”
http://shop.canonical.com/product_info.php?products_id=134 – Click “Ubuntu Online Training page”
http://www.ubuntu.com/training/e-learning – > Click “Check out two lessons for free – click here (registration required)”
http://training.canonical.com/enrol/oscommerce/actions.php?action=proceed_to_shop&trial_action=1&id=2

This took me to the launchpad login where I used my launchpad login to gain access. Of course if my mum is going to be doing this she will need a launchpad account of her own. The next page had the following text “You have successfully enrolled on the introductory taster of the Ubuntu Desktop Training (Elearning) course. This means you can access two out of the ten lessons of the course. To access the complete course, please consider purchasing the full version in our store. To enter the course, please click the Continue button below.” so I clicked “Continue”. Next I get “Ubuntu Desktop Training has been designed in a modular manner. Ten lessons in total will provide you with all the information required to get up and running with Ubuntu, as quickly as possible. You can go through the same lessons as many times as you like, or skip those which are less relevant.” and some more details including the requirement for Adobe Flash.

Surprisingly it says:-

“Follow the next three steps to get started:
1. Cancel any pop-up blocks; the course can not load without this!
2. If you don’t already have a Flash player installed, download one of the following plugins: Flash (choose: tar.gz if running Ubuntu) or Gnash (available soon) then:
3. Click ‘Enter Course’ to proceed and enjoy!“

I’m somewhat surprised (and a little alarmed) that we’re telling people to grab a tarball from Adobe rather than use the package manager to install Flash. Of course ideally we shouldn’t use Adobe Flash for this at all, but that’s a completely separate argument.

Finally I click “Enter Introductory Taster”.

Well, I say ‘finally’, in fact my browser blocks the popup and I get yet another page to click a link to “« Click here to open the course »” with the tip “(you may need to turn off pop-up blocking for this website)” in small text.

This whole process is insane and needs to be made easier to find and get into. My mum would have given up long ago and gone off to make a cake or something more productive. Not requiring Launchpad for the logon would be a start, and making a link directly from the store to the sample training material would also help.

Getting access aside, the course is presented in a pop-up window containing a flash based application. The window is resizable up and down, and the content scales well which is helpful given my Mum has a fairly low resolution screen at the moment.

The free sections are ‘Introducing Ubuntu’ and ‘Exploring the Ubuntu Desktop’ with a short ‘Course Introduction’ which explains the way the course works. As I mentioned previously the course is based on Ubuntu 7.10, but is being updated for 10.04 right now.

The available sections seemed to be paced well with clear diagrams and easy to understand narration. The interface is straightforward with simple navigation options for ‘home’, ‘back’, and ‘next’ at the bottom of the screen, and ‘help’, ‘glossary’ and ‘exit’ at the top. A slider along the bottom shows how far through the current lesson you are, and a page count below that shows how far through the course you are.

As this was only an introductory taster I couldn’t tell if the whole course would be suitable, but given the rest of the subject, it seems to fit with what I expect Mum will want out of the computer. The rest of the chapters are ‘Using the Internet’, ‘Using OpenOffice Applications’, ‘Ubuntu and Games’, ‘Customising the Desktop and Applications’, ‘Making the Most of Images and Photos’, ‘Playing Music and Videos’, ‘Ubuntu Help and Support’ and finally ‘Partitioning and Booting’. Much of that will be useful to Mum, I’m sure. Some less so – I don’t think she’ll be doing much in the way of disk partitioning, but you never know, from small acorns do mighty something something..

I look forward to evaluating the 10.04 version of the course, and will in all likelyhood set this up for Mum as it will cover a lot of ground that I wouldn’t have time to do well. In fact I’ve already set her up with a Launchpad account which will help not only with this training but will also allow her to buy music online, share files, sync notes, file bugs (hah!), ask technical questions and whatever else Canonical add to Ubuntu One in the future.

                          

Wed 17th Feb

Today my Mum went to the local library to ask about computer training. I had a brief chat with her and she seemed to enjoy it. Apparently the woman in the library showed her Google for searching and Google Maps so she could see a picture of her own house. She’s been given some notes and has arranged to go back next Friday when apparently they will look at ‘email’.

The librarian asked my Mum to bring in email addresses of friends and family and she’d set her up with an email address to send some mails out. As I’ve already setup an email account for Mum I’ll give her all the credentials and access details for the webmail system and they can use that, which will be a good starting point.

It’s interesting to me that the first thing a user gets shown is nothing to do with the software on the local machine, but a browser and an online service. How things have changed since the days of “This is a DOS prompt, type ‘win’ to start Windows”

I’ve been wondering how to get Mum up to speed outside of the training she gets from the library. One concern I have is that once they get past ‘playing’ with online services they’ll start looking at Microsoft specific desktop applications, rather than generic ‘Word Processor’ type tutorials. I think I’ll take a trip to the library at the weekend myself and take a look at their offerings to evaluate them.

One thing that I can do as an alternative is of course teach Mum some fundamentals myself. Some of that could be done in person at her house – or indeed mine. I will have a copy of her machine in a VM and can therefore show her what things will look like on her own desktop but at my place. I’d need to schedule some time for that, and with a job and family of my own that will be a challenge. Especially given this is very new stuff for my Mum so I’ll likely need to show her stuff multiple times before it sinks in.

So I have come up with two alternative strategies. The first is to look for training course that my Mum can attend to get her up to speed. Canonical have some training courses which are outsourced to training partners around the world. The Ubuntu Desktop Course looks the most appropriate for my Mum however the UK Ubuntu Training Schedule shows that it’s not running in the UK, and I don’t fancy paying the air fare for my Mum to go to Brazil for a 2 day desktop course!

The course also runs as an e-learning event which can be ordered from the Online Training Store for less than £40 which seems like an absolute bargain to me.

Once paid up and registered on the course my Mum can pace herself, taking her time over the sections she wants to, and repeating sections if she wants. The course content is based around Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) which was the last release before the last LTS (Long Term Support) release, and it’s no longer supported. So I don’t want to install 7.10 on her computer because I’ll only have to upgrade it at some point very soon, and I’ll get no patches/fixes whilst she’s on 7.10.

I dropped a mail to the training department at Canonical asking some questions about the course and releases and got a nice prompt response. They tell me the content is pretty much generic so much of it applies to releases after 7.10, and I can see how that’s the case as much of Ubuntu has stayed the same for the last two years. I was told that Canonical are currently updating the Desktop Course for Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) which is due to coincide with the Ubuntu release at the end of April this year. So I could sign her up for the 10.04 version of the course when it’s ready. That gives me 2 months between now and the end of April to keep her entertained.

Which brings me onto my second alternative strategy. Screencasts! I’d like to create a bunch of very short screencasts (2-5 mins maximum duration) which go through the basics of computer use. These could be kept as a library of short tutorials which Mum can tap into and watch as and when she’s ready. I could put them on her computer so she’s got them on day one. In the future she will no doubt ask me questions, and I can create more screencasts to cover those topics. Here’s the cunning bit. I can record them at home, using my Virtual Machine copy of her desktop and then save them into a shared Dropbox folder which syncs to her desktop PC. So all she has to do is turn on the computer and connect to the Internet and she’ll get the new tutorials automagically on her computer – once I make them

I think a combination of the following may be right for her:-

• Initial hands on with librarian
• An introduction to her specific computer setup from me
• An online course from Canonical
• Screencasts

Suggestions and comments welcome!

                          

Monday 15th Feb

Today I was watching the UPS package tracking website to see if/when the Acer Aspire Revo had arrived home. Pretty much as soon as I got through the door I unpacked one of the revos and set it up on my desk and connected to one of the two LCD panels that usually connect to my desktop PC. The plan was to restore the Windows XP and Ubuntu installs onto the 160GB disk on the revo using Clonezilla, having already done the backup yesterday.

The Revo has no optical drive, so I used Unetbootin on my desktop PC to write the Clonezilla ISO image onto a 1GB USB stick. Clonezilla is quite a bit smaller than that so you can probably get away with a lower capacity USB stick, but this was one I had to hand, and didn’t mind trashing the contents. Booting the Revo from USB should be fairly straightforward but for some reason pressing F12 during boot to get a ‘boot menu’ doesn’t always work. I had to boot into the BIOS and change the boot order to put USB at the top of the priority list, and disable Splashtop, to reliably make F12 work on boot.

Once I had Clonezilla booted and the Revo on the LAN I thought it might be prudent to backup the factory installed stuff on the hard disk ‘just in case’. It would allow me to return it to factory fresh if I ever sold it on or had to return it under warranty. The clone takes up very little space – 1.9GB – there’s no point not doing it. Once cloned I started restoring the clone that I’d taken of the Compaq Revo 250G disk yesterday. This is where it all kinda went a bit wrong.

I had assumed that Clonezilla would magically resize down the partitions when going from a 250GB disk to a 160GB one. Sadly this isn’t the case. Clonezilla doesn’t (yet) support going from a one media to a smaller one. I clearly should have read the documentation more here. I tried various options including restoring individual partitions rather than the whole disk, but it was no-go. So I had a bit of a think and formulated a plan. I’d resize the partitions on the source 250GB disk down so that they totalled less than 160GB, then clone it over to the Revos 160GB disk.

I didn’t have room on my desk for the Compaq to be booted up to do the partition resizing so I took a different approach. I have a few USB disk caddies kicking around for these kinds of eventualities. Some are SATA, some are USB, one of them does both – which is quite handy. It’s a cheap and cheerful USB caddy but it works reliably enough. I yanked the 250GB disk out of the Compaq Evo – which was very easy – the Evo reminds me of the old IBM PS/2 in that it’s incredibly modular and easy to maintain inside. I attached the disk to the IDE interface on the USB caddy and plugged the USB cable into my laptop.

I already had gparted installed on my laptop which is running Ubuntu Lucid (10.04), but if I didnt then I could have easily installed it or grabbed an Ubuntu Live CD off the shelf and used that instead. I fired up gparted and pointed it at ‘/dev/sdb’ (the 250GB disk) and took a look at the layout. As I’ve previously mentioned I split the disk in half, XP on the first 50%, Ubuntu on the second 50%, but what I needed was for both partitions combined to come in less than 160GB – the target disk size.

It turns out to be a complex operation including resize down the XP partition, move the Ubuntu partition down (to the left of) the disk, then resize down the Ubuntu partitions (/ and swap) and resize down the extended partition that the Ubuntu partitions sit in, and finally move the extended partition down the disk. All of this can be queued up in gparted, so you basically get the disk looking the way you want before you hit apply to actually ‘make stuff happen’.

I chose to resize the Windows partition down to about 55GB and the same for Ubuntu with a little extra for the swap. All of that came in under my target of 160GB, indeed I had some spare, which I could resize up to on the target, or perhaps use as scratch space later. I don’t think it matters having a GB or so free at the end of the disk when in all likelyhood my Mum isn’t going to fill much of the 55GB she has – in either OS.

The gparted operations take a long time because there’s a lot of data to munch up and it’s all being done over USB, so it’s now time for bed.

Tuesday 16th Feb

I woke this morning to discover the gparted operation completed successfully overnight.

When I got in from work I figured that I could do a direct disk to disk clone of the 250GB to the 160GB on the Revo rather than backup and restore. So I attached the USB caddy (containing the 250GB disk) to the Revo, booted Clonezilla and kicked it off. Pretty quickly I ended up with everything copied nicely over to the internal 160GB disk. Booting up the Revo from the internal disk resulted in a Grub menu (this is a good thing) and I could select Ubuntu 9.10 and it booted succesfully to the desktop.

Everything was detected and just worked. Ubuntu found the wireless adapter and auto selected the open source ‘nv’ video driver. I added the nVidia binary video driver because the Revo has an nVidia ION GPU which is well supported by the binary driver – unlike the nVidia card in the Compaq Evo – which isn’t supported anymore. The whole ‘move an install from one machine to another completely different one’ success with Ubuntu is one of the features that I use infrequently, but when I do, I love that it Just Works.

I then tried to boot into XP. Oh dear. Oh deary dear. Now I knew this wasn’t going to be straightforward, but it’s so sad to see an OS just barf on boot because the underlying hardware has changed a bit. I decided not to spend too long lamenting the crap situation and instead chose to reinstall Windows XP directly on the Revo. The Revo has no optical drive though, so I couldn’t stick my Windows XP CD in. USB caddy to the rescue! I yanked the IDE CD-ROM drive out of the Compaq Evo and attached it to the USB caddy in place of the 250GB hard disk.

To my surprise the Revo boot menu showed up the “USB NEC CD-ROM” as an option, and I was able to boot from the XP CD. Sadly the XP setup program bluescreened after it loaded up drivers, and after a quick search I discovered there was a BIOS setting that needed changing. There is an option in the BIOS to set the SATA setting which defaults to “AHCI” which causes XP to blue screen. Changing this setting to “IDE” mode and rebooting fixed the issue. I simply followed the same process of installing XP as I did previously, but when it asked me where to install I chose to delete the XP partition and then recreate it – leaving the Ubuntu partitions untouched.

My original XP CD is quite old, so it doesn’t have drivers for modern hardware. As I tell people frequently ‘Ubuntu has more drivers for more hardware out of the box than any other OS’ and that includes XP. Obviously Ubuntu is relatively new and my XP CD is years old, so it’s understandable to some degree, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating. Especially when the XP installer has no way of adding drivers during install without re-spinning the CD – an activity I’m unlikely to do for a one-off computer setup like this Revo.

Once XP was installed I had to go and find drivers for wireless LAN, the video card, audio hardware and other onboard devices. This was helped by someone who has gathered all the drivers up into one neat package . It’s a bit worrying to grab a random zip like that for the fundamental drivers for the system, but it seemed to be in use by a number of other Revo users who reported it worked well. If it barfed I could always reinstall again – I’m getting good at that

After installing the nVidia drivers from that package I started getting popup errors about nvcpl.dll and some other dll every time I booted into Windows. I don’t know if it’s specific to the above packaged nVidia driver, but I doubt it. I found numerous posts from people claiming to have the issue. Good to see that nVidia drivers are the same bunch of crap on Windows as they are on Linux.

One of the other (many) problems with installing XP is that it will trash the master boot record (MBR) which – if it was the only OS on the machine – wouldn’t be a problem for most people. Those of us that dual boot end up with a broken boot loader and the inability to start our favourite OS. Luckily this is all very well known and there’s a nice bit of documentation that details how to fix it.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RecoveringUbuntuAfterInstallingWindows

I put an Ubuntu 9.10 Live CD into the CD-ROM drive which was still attached to the USB caddy and booted off it to fix this issue. I ran the grub-install command as outlined on the above page and then rebooted again. I now had a grub menu re-installed and could boot into Ubuntu again. However this now broke my ability to boot into Windows!

The grub-install command when run on the Live CD had incorrectly configured the grub boot loader so it couldn’t find the Windows install. There was an error in the grub setup which made it look for Windows on (hd0) when it should be looking on (hd0,1). This was easily fixed by booting into Ubuntu on the hard disk and running grub-install from there. I actually didn’t run grub-install, but sudo apt-get install grub-pc --reinstall which seemed like a good idea at the time. Worked a treat.

So at this point I now had a dual-boot Windows XP and Ubuntu 9.10 install running pretty sweet on the little Revo. Time to take a backup with my new best friend, Clonezilla! I have a nice backup of the machine in case things go horribly wrong later.


alan@wopr:/media/drobo/images/2010-02-17-00-img_mumbuntu_revo$ ls -lh
total 7.0G
-rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 4 2010-02-17 01:28 disk
-rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 8.0K 2010-02-17 01:28 Info-dmi.txt
-rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 16K 2010-02-17 01:28 Info-lshw.txt
-rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 2.4K 2010-02-17 01:28 Info-lspci.txt
-rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 286 2010-02-17 01:28 Info-packages.txt
-rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 10 2010-02-17 01:28 parts
-rw------- 1 alan alan 2.0G 2010-02-17 01:04 sda1.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.aa
-rw------- 1 alan alan 2.0G 2010-02-17 01:12 sda1.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.ab
-rw------- 1 alan alan 1.8G 2010-02-17 01:20 sda1.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.ac
-rw------- 1 alan alan 1.3G 2010-02-17 01:28 sda5.ext4-ptcl-img.gz.aa
-rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 37 2010-02-17 00:55 sda-chs.sf
-rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 31K 2010-02-17 00:55 sda-hidden-data-after-mbr
-rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 512 2010-02-17 00:55 sda-mbr
-rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 466 2010-02-17 00:55 sda-pt.parted
-rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 361 2010-02-17 00:55 sda-pt.sf
-rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 53 2010-02-17 01:28 swappt-sda6.info


Interesting that Ubuntu (sda5.ext4-ptcl-img.gz.aa) takes up much less space (1.3G) than the Windows XP (sda1.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.aa, sda1.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.ab & sda1.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.ac) install (2.0+2.0+1.8=5.8G).

Tomorrow Mum will be going to the library to see someone about training lessons on the computer. This will be a big moment for her as it will be the first semi-formal training on a computer she’s had. I look forward to hearing from her about how it went.

                          

I got the Compaq Evo desktop back to my house and on my desk today. The first thing I did was open up the box and see what we had inside. It’s a 1.7GHz CPU with 512MB RAM (2x128MiB + 1x256MiB), 250GB IDE hard disk, nVidia video card and CD-ROM drive. I had a rummage in my box-o-RAM for some suitable SDRAM and managed to get the box up to 768MiB (3x256MiB), which should help things a bit. I plan to supply the computer with an external USB hard disk for doing incremental backups of data only, just in case.

After the chat with Mum yesterday, I decided to hedge my bets and install a dual-boot Windows XP and Ubuntu 9.10 system. That way she’d be all setup for whatever OS she chooses, and we have the ability to switch (in either direction) based on our experiences. Given the disk is 250GB I decided to just split it 50/50, installing Windows XP first.

The process for installing XP from the original CD went smoothly as expected. During the installation I told XP to only use 50% of the disk, leaving the rest free for my subsequent Ubuntu installation. The post-install steps of ‘install windows update’, ‘install SP3′, ‘install updates’, ‘install IE8′, ‘activate WGA’, ‘install updates’ interspersed with reboots is painful but fairly predictable, with only one hangup. I then added what I thought might be useful with little planning including Microsoft Security Essentials, Openoffice.org, Firefox 3.6, Thunderbird 3, Adobe Flash and Adobe Acrobat.

Once that lot was done I added a few more interesting things. I registered a dynamic hostname with DynDNS so that I could “get to” her machine over the Internet without having to ask her for the IP address. I installed a Windows client (from the same website) which automatically updates the Dynamic DNS entry. I also installed gitso (a remote control app) so I could easily remotely control the Windows desktop.

I already have a domain and email configured, so I setup an email address for Mum and setup Thunderbird to access it via IMAP. I received mail and sent a test mail to make sure it all worked okay. The anti-spam features are at the server end, so she shouldn’t have to worry about that at all – not that she’ll even know what spam is to be fair!

I created a separate user for Mum and myself, both are admins. Perhaps I should set her account to be a limited one for now, so she can’t do too much damage, or install random things. There’s possibly changes I’ll make to the Windows install, perhaps switching to Google chrome as the browser, maybe add other apps I’ve not considered yet. I should install some backup software for certain. The one that comes on the XP CD will probably be good enough.

Next I moved on to install Ubuntu, which by contrast was a breeze I just put an Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) CD in the drive and booted off it. I went through the installer chosing to install onto the empty (unpartitioned) space on the disk. I set myself up as the first user and selected to encrypt the home folders using ecryptfs (basically a tick box in the installation). I didn’t use the Windows migration assistant, enabled popcon (popularity contest) and finished the install.

I booted into Ubuntu, recorded my encryption passphrase and installed the outstanding 223 updates followed by a reboot. Once back in I attempted to install the binary driver for the nVidia Vanta card, however I was scuppered. It turns out that the Vanta cards are not supported any more by the nVidia binary driver. The video performance of the open source nv driver is quite sucky. I suspect that Mum won’t be especially bothered by that, but it’s annoying nonetheless. I had a look around in my box-o-cards for a replacement card but there was nothing suitable, so continued to use the onboard half-height Vanta card.

I then installed some extra applications.


sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras gramps deja-dup openssh-server ddclient apticron firefox-adblock-plus


ubuntu-restricted-extras: Installs Adobe Flash, video/audio codecs, fonts and other evilness.
gramps: Family tree software. I already have maintained some of our family tree in gramps, so I can help Mum here.
deja-dup: Simple scheduled backup tool to backup data to the USB hard disk.
openssh-server: So I can ssh into her Ubuntu machine and remotely adminster/update it. I can also tunnel VNC over this connection.
ddclient: DynDNS client to update the dynamic DNS hostname, so I can find her machine on the Internet.
apticron: Emails me when updates are available.
firefox-adblock-plus: Adblock Plus add-on for Firefox.

Finally I created a new user for my Mum. In Ubuntu 9.10 there’s no tickbox in the “Users and Groups” application to enable encrypted home using ecryptfs. This has been fixed in Ubuntu 10.04, but under 9.10 I had to use the following command to create Mums account:-


$ sudo adduser <username> --encrypt-home


After which I recorded the encryption passphrase as prompted by a pop-up dialog. This is essential if I need to re-install the OS (for example) and restore access to the encrypted files in the user home directory. Hopefully I’ll never have to worry about that, but I just know that if I don’t write down the encryption passphrase, I’ll end up needing it at some point.

Sunday 14th Feb

I wanted to buy another Acer Aspire Revo as a media playback PC at my house (I already have one). During the order process I toyed with buying an extra one (they’re quite cheap computers) for my Mum instead of the crusty-but-working Compaq Evo I had been using up until now. After a short internal fight of “she doesn’t need this!” vs. “this would be such a sweet PC for her!”, the latter demon won, and I bought two (one for me, one for her). So now Mum is destined to get a Revo instead of an Evo (which seems appropriate somehow).

I pondered how I could get the installations of XP and Ubuntu that I’d already done on the Evo into the Revo when it arrives on Monday. The Evo has a desktop size 250GB disk, and the revo has a laptop sized 160GB disk. I discovered Clonezilla which I downloaded and burned onto a CD-R. Clonezilla has some funky options for making a ‘clone’ of disks or partitions and restoring them on another machine/disk. It also has a funky dist-to-local-disk option which sounded interesting. It seems I’m the only one who never knew about Clonezilla, because as soon as I mentioned it, people told me they’ve been raving about it for ages.

Booting Clonezilla on the Evo allowed me to follow some basic prompts to mount a samba share on my network (in my case that’s my Drobo with lots of disk space) and backup the 250GB disk over the network to a bunch of files. Even more amazing is that Clonezilla only backed up the data. So I didn’t end up with a monster 250GB file, but a few much smaller ones:-


alan@wopr:/media/drobo/images/2010-02-14-17-img$ ls -l
total 6347448
-rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 4 2010-02-14 18:18 disk
-rw------- 1 alan alan 2097152000 2010-02-14 17:49 hda1.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.aa
-rw------- 1 alan alan 2097152000 2010-02-14 18:00 hda1.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.ab
-rw------- 1 alan alan 1003519444 2010-02-14 18:06 hda1.ntfs-ptcl-img.gz.ac
-rw------- 1 alan alan 1295502304 2010-02-14 18:17 hda5.ext4-ptcl-img.gz.aa
-rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 37 2010-02-14 17:36 hda-chs.sf
-rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 31744 2010-02-14 17:36 hda-hidden-data-after-mbr
-rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 512 2010-02-14 17:36 hda-mbr
-rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 463 2010-02-14 17:36 hda-pt.parted
-rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 361 2010-02-14 17:36 hda-pt.sf
-rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 14359 2010-02-14 18:18 Info-dmi.txt
-rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 11677 2010-02-14 18:18 Info-lshw.txt
-rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 1336 2010-02-14 18:18 Info-lspci.txt
-rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 286 2010-02-14 18:18 Info-packages.txt
-rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 10 2010-02-14 18:18 parts
-rwxr--r-- 1 alan alan 53 2010-02-14 18:18 swappt-hda6.info
alan@wopr:/media/drobo/images/2010-02-14-17-img$ du -hs .
6.1G .


Fantastic!

Looking forward to tomorrow when the Revo arrives. Pondering how badly Windows XP is going to react to being moved from the Evo to the Revo.

                          

Friday 12th Feb

Today I went to Mums to look at the computer. She doesn’t have an Internet connection at home, which is another thing I need to evaluate for her. So I took a few USB dongles with me so that I could get online if I needed to, and see what the 3G reception was like, in case we decide that 3G is preferable to wired broadband for her.

I mentioned in my previous introductory blog post about Mumbuntu that I don’t like the idea of other people ‘helping’ support my Mum in her computing endeavours. This is at least in part because I think most people are clueless about net security, viruses and the “right” way to operate a computer. Having someone who is experienced with XP help my Mum is clearly potentially useful, but it could lead to her being given duff advice.

I’m sure some people reading this will say “it’s her computer, let her decide”, and that’s a valid point, if you’re not the person who has to pick up the pieces after someone suggests to install the latest crapware. The computer from my brother is a case in point…

I had a poke about on the Compaq Evo desktop PC to see what state the Windows XP installation was in. This was supposed to have been ‘cleaned’ but I guess different IT professionals have diverse ideas about what ‘clean’ means. I removed an old out of date anti-virus package and installed Microsoft Security Essentials, then kicked off a scan. It found numerous viruses, trojans and other malware.

Some of this was in the form of nasty applications like Antivirus 2009 (a well known trojan and fake AV product) whilst others were embedded in fake media files that someone had downloaded via P2P. There were also lots of ‘helper’ applications and drivers for printers, mp3 players and digital cameras she didn’t own. I started cleaning up but rapidly realised this was a tiresome activity, and I’d probably be better of wiping it and reinstalling the OS, or a different one.

I explained to Mum that it would need to be reinstalled and I’d need to take it away to do that. This is no loss to her as she’s not used it yet, so there’s no data there. We had a bit of a chat about my stance in terms of Windows and how I’d prefer her to run Ubuntu. I explained that as she had no experience baggage, it would make little or no difference to her whether she learned how to use Windows or Ubuntu. I also pointed out that it’s easier (for me) to support, lower cost and flexible.

She’d been told that Ubuntu will have some compatibility problems, and given I know what camera and printer she has, that’s very likely. However her main ‘use cases’ for the computer involve basic web browing, email and some family tree work. No doubt these requirements will change over time, and I hope that Ubuntu can keep up with those needs as time goes on. So I know that Ubuntu isn’t perfect, but in my mind it’s a lot better than XP and cheaper and less resource intensive than either Windows Vista or 7.

One thing that came up during our chat was training. I can certainly show her the basics to get up and running, but she’s keen to learn, and as she’s retired has plenty of time to devote to it. She has a meeting today with someone local who does computer training courses for seniors, which could be useful for her. However the chances are very high that the training will be both Windows based, and Windows focussed which won’t help at all if she’s running Ubuntu.

Canonical have an Ubuntu Desktop Training course, but I can’t see any upcoming in the UK. I also wonder how well she’d fare on that course given she may be missing some very fundamental skills. The course structure seems to indicate that “computer literacy is assumed and is a pre-requisite”. Perhaps I could get her up to speed with the pre-reqs, then put her on that course… if they had one running. I note also that the course uses 8.04 which, whilst it’s a little old now (seems funny to say that) could be a good starting point.

Another option is to teach her everything myself. I have a potential plan for this. More on that in a later post.

Just a reminder that I’ll be tagging all my posts on this subject with ‘mumbuntu‘. So if you’re interested in them but not the other posts in my blog then you can subscribe to the mumbuntu only feed.