It is quite a while since I set up Linux box and in those days there was quite a bit of fiddling about to do so I concluded that Linux was really for geeks.
However the other day I had a client come in with broken laptop. The disk was partially crashed so, theoretically, I just needed to ghost the disk and put a new one in. However the disk was too far gone to get a ghost, but I did get all her documents. Next step was to reload the system onto a new disk, but she had no system disks, and it being a version of Vista that I didn't have a copy of I was unable to do that. In discussion she said that she only ever used IE, Word and Outlook and had no desire to do anything else. The evidence was that she allso used it for her photos. Although the laptop was old she didn't want to buy a new one, especially as she had just laid out for one for her son. Perhaps she could borrow that from time to time.
So I had a look at Linux distrobutions and found a site www.tuxs.org/chooser/ which had a few easy questions which led me to a choice between Suse and Fedora. I tried Suse, or openSuse which is the free one. Suse is backed up by Novell who produce professional versions for enterprise so it seemed a reasonable choice.
After burning the iso file to a DVD it loaded into the laptop and worked straight away. In the set up we needed to set two passwords, and once running we had to enter the wireless password and then set the email client up. Once that was done she had Email through Kontact (called the Personal Information Manager), Webbrowsing through Firefox, word processing through Libre Office and several different ways to handle her photos. It looks similar to Vista (because microsoft copied a load of features from the Linux desktop, KDE), and although the behaviour is a little different as you don't need to double click so often, the whole system is an easy transisition for someone who is not computer literate.
OpenSuse comes with a stack of other things as well as those mentioned above, for example the Gimp is included. The Gimp is an image manipulation program which is pretty well as good as photoshop. Libre Office appears to be a badged version of Open Office, so there is pretty well everything a normal office worker will need. We have yet to set her printer up but there is a whole suite of HP printer programs included.
The laptop is a Compaq and HP have worked a lot with the Linux community so with an HP laptop and printer we were on a safe bet switching to Linux. I tried with an Acer machine and that worked straight away apart from the network. Putting a separate network card into an expansion slot resolved that immediately, but I very quickly found a solution on-line for the inbuilt lan adaptor. Connecting my network attached Xerox printers was no great problem either as both printers came with linux drivers on the CDs. the reason I had a spare Acer is that it was one I picked up cheap because it kept freezing under Windows, no such problems under Linux.
I have now started loading other software onto my Acer and, of course, this takes it out of the non geek zone. however the support from the community forum has been great. I now have Kompozer loaded and a substitute for one of my favourite programms, Astrogrep. There is no Astrogrep for Linux, but someone has built a product called SearchMonkey which can be compiled onto Linux (not for the faint hearted!). I will continue to test this Linux distro as I quite fancy switching to it in the future.
I suspect that Fedora would have been just as good as openSuse, I just happenned to try Suse first. OpenSuse can be found at www.opensuse.org/en/ and Fedora can be found at fedoraproject.org/.
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