A real life "granny" test – The Ubuntu Experiment

Maybe it is one of the most used arguments to convince people from “the other distribution” to wake up, shape up, get a life and move your behind over to “this distribution”: the “my granny uses it daily without a problem” argument. It is used so often that you wonder why Microsoft still has a 95% or more market share on the desktop.

The good thing is that right now there is a real life experiment going on where a young man is getting his mother to move away from Windows and over to Ubuntu. Why his mother and not his granny?

Why my mother?

My mother has recently been complaining about her Windows XP computer becoming too slow. To my great surprise and delight, when I jokingly suggested installing Ubuntu on her computer next to Windows, she agreed. She is the perfect test candidate as she is quite the average adult computer user, not a gamer and, well, my mother! This means I’m there to help her (I’m still in high school, so I live with my mother) whenever she encounters problems. Furthermore, I’m there to write down her experiences and problems so we can finally really see whether Ubuntu has become as good as or better than Windows.

Yes, Vincent is really involved in Xubuntu and definitely has a bias for open source software, but I know him as an honest and balanced writer with a clear eye for what is good and what is not. You can expect an honest account of his mother’s journey into Ubuntu.

Great initiative!

Webilder – Surprise yourself with a new desktop… every five minutes

If there is one major improvement for the Linux desktop in 2007 is it progress in the field of eye-candy. With Compiz-Fusion and the various themepacks available for KDE and GNOME you can have stunning desktops without paying a performance hit price. I was actually missing just one element to my eye-candy heaven.
The wallpapers on my desktop change regularly. Sometimes because my mood changes, sometimes because I am bored with it too quickly. The use of the Flock webbrowser gave me an overview of pictures that are available at Flickr. Really, the quality of those images is good and some people are amazingly gifted. “Wouldn’t it be nice to have those on my desktop?”, I wondered.

The answer is Webilder. Webilder is a great applet that downloads new images from Flickr every day according to the tags you have entered and then changes the desktop at preset intervals. You want a new wallpaper every five minutes. you get a new one every five minutes.
Installing it shouldn’t be much of a problem. There are repositories for Dapper, Edgy and Feisty, as well as for Debian Sid and Etch, apart from the tarball and deb packages.

Setting up the tags can be quite fickle, but the Webilder website helps you out. You can enter your tags there. Keep the Webilder preferences window open at the same time. The website generates the tags for you and it’s up to you to drag-N-drop it to the preferences window. However, keep the tags as broad as you can. You will be surprised by the rich variety and creativity of the artists that created the images.

Tags: Ubuntu, flickr

Mike Kavis – Comparing Linux Distributions

Mike Kavis tried out various Linux distributions over the last months, both 32-bits and 64-bits versions, in search for a distribution with ease of use and ease of install.

The conclusion: when it comes to user friendly distributions it is a close finish, but he recommends Kubuntu and Mepis

Summary

All of these distros except OpenSuse (couldn’t load) are great options for those wanting to move to Linux (I will try Mint again later). For those who are more experienced with administering Linux desktops, you may have come to different conclusions. I did spend a lot
of time with most distros performing command line magic to make some things work (especially on the 64-bit environment). Kubuntu and Ubuntu were the only distros where I just installed and went on my way. All others required some amount of tweaking.

I had the luxury of owning several different machines and some time to experiment with the different Linux distributions. Each distribution that I was able to get up and running ran well. I was able to make use out of some old machines that were running poorly on XP. Most importantly, my new laptop that was running Vista very slowly is now cruising with Mepis.

By no means was this a highly scientific experiment. This is the view from a technical guy with limited systems administration skills. Take it for what it’s worth. My recommendation is Kubuntu and Mepis.

Ubuntu, what is it? Presentation for the Dutch Gutsy Release Party

On October 27, 2007, the Dutch Ubuntu community had it’s Gutsy Release Party. I was privileged to give a presentation about Ubuntu there. This article is a reflection of that presentation. I have translated both the talk and the slides into English. The slides are available for download here. Enjoy the read, but beware, it’s a lengthy piece.

Introduction

The organizing committee for the Dutch Gutsy Release Party indicated that the theme of the presentation should be “Ubuntu, what is it?”. The initial response was to create a presentation that describes all current and new features of Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon. But with an audience of people that is already working and playing with Ubuntu it becomes something different. We in the evangelizing business call it ‘preaching the gospel to the believers’. I decided to take the liberty to have a more liberal approach to the question: “Ubuntu, what is it?”. It led to five different angles that each provide a piece of the answer and that’s what I want to discuss this afternoon.

The article continues here.

Gutsy Release Party, the Netherlands, 27 October 2007

It was fun being at the Gutsy Gibbon Release party in the Netherlands. There is a nice photo impression here.

I was honored to give a presentation on Ubuntu myself. Some pictures of me in action: