This is a chronicle of my adventure. I am moving my girlfriend and her Windows-only family to Linux. It has been frustrating because I work and go to school and have other side projects and because her mom is an outright bitch to me a lot. I won't go into that unless it hinders my progress in moving them over. It slows me down because I hate going to her house. She lives with her parents still.
My girlfriend was a theatre major before deciding to study film theory. She's a smart girl who was raised pure Windows 98/95 until she met me two years ago. She now is comfortable on my home PC, to get on the internet and burn CDs. I run Slackware 8.1 with assorted add-on programs, but it's a basic Slackware system. I do 90% of my configuring in pico or tty1 (console) or konsole (KDE console). I operate KDE 3.0 with Mozilla, everybuddy, k3b (cdburner), grip (CD player and ripper), and xmms (Everyone say winamp clone). I don't have TOO much custom stuff on there, and I don't run any servers anymore because I lost my internet at home.
A while back, her Windows disk crashed, and it dawned on me that it was pirated. Since she was uprooted anyway, I decided to install linux on her other hard drive to help her remove the Windows data from the corrupt drive (OS corrupted anyway), and to back it up on hard drive and CD. I have now installed Slackware 8.1 on her computer, which is a dual 466 celeron abit board. Yes, I gave it to her. I was using it before I upgraded to a 1.8GHz.
With Linux, I felt it would be an added plus to be able to repair her computer system either by talking her into making hardware changes over the phone, or by having a login made available for me. I will be moving 100 miles away and will be selling my car to attend college. I'm $1700 in debt thanks to the fact that my dad recently went from rich to poor, thanks to the fact that I'm under 23 and unmarried, and thanks to the fact that tax years take time to process, so he's still rich, even if he has $0. I can't afford to give my girlfriend an operating system or office right now, and decided against going further into debt. Her parents already are taking loans out to pay for her college. Her college money was spent paying bills when her father couldn't find work.
Financial situation is pretty dire, so Windows + Office is not an acceptable answer for me.
I installed Slackware 8.1, and I gave her and her family user names. My girlfriend alone knows the root password (besides me). Her parents have trivial passwords that even they can remember. I switched default init from 3 to 4 (for you tech unsavvy, that's from text-based to desktop-based standard operation). I made sure that kdm was the default desktop manager. I have bad luck with gdm... Something to do with the inability to reboot easily.
Once I tested the ease of booting up in Linux, I added Windows to the lilo.conf so that she could dual boot into the broken Windows drive. Who knows? Maybe it's just being cranky for 2 weeks.
The next task was to get the CDROM drives available to everyone, because that's what my girlfriend wanted. Because she had a CDR, I changed lilo also to "append /dev/hdd=ide-scsi", so that the CDR device would pretend to be SCSI (some linux-only thing that I can't explain... all CD writers are "scsi"). I changed the /dev/hdc and /dev/scd0 devices to the group of users, and allowed group execute access. Then I edited fstab (the filesystem table, where default settings for mount points, e.g. D: in Windows) are stored, and changed the rule for CDROM from owner only to user-based rules. So anyone with rights would be able to mount it, and not just root.
I installed k3b. It's smooth! It's my favorite CD-writing software for linux.
I have also installed OpenOffice 1.0.2, and yes, I know 1.1.0 is out. I just downloaded it recently. It's next on my to-do's.
I also need to configure her sound driver, which requires a kernel compilation. I keep trying to do symmetrical processing, and it keeps crapping out on me. Either the kernel will panic on boot, or it won't compile at all because of some module option I chose. I removed many unnecessary options, but what concerns me is that /dev/hdb3 (her / folder) won't mount with my new kernels. It's supposed to load ext3 (journaled filesystem). For some reason, it just dies when it tries to mount them, then goes kernel panic on me. I'm going to try sans second processor. I'm not sure if that one works correctly. It's about 20 degrees F hotter than the first one when it's configured for single-processor use.
I've been trying to get a modem or two to work, and lucky me, they're both winmodems without linux drivers. I've ordered 2 real modems off pricewatch, and the price was a real stinger. I opted to buy a $50 real modem, with all the components. I can reuse those in the future, even if I opt to use freebsd or openbsd. Pricewatch had most of the crappy winmodems priced at $6 shipped to your house. I got a 56k hardware modem with V34-V92 standards. I'm tired of spending hours upon hours trying to get the damn winmodems to work.
I was surprised at how hard it was to get a modem to work. I have had cable internet or other ethernet-driven internet only since using Linux. It was actually easier in my opinion to configure ethernet than in Windows.
This is just a chronicle of my switch, and I hope it's educational for anyone who hasn't built linux up yet. If I had space, I'd post screenshots of my progress so that the unexperienced could take a peek.
Do any veterans have any advice for me? She's 20, artistic, computer-savvy (windows mostly). Her parents are completely and blissfully ignorant of computers besides "juno" and "Minesweeper". Her dad just wants to be able to get on the internet, and her mom... well, she's a little flaky, so I don't know what she wants. She really just needs access to the internet.
Next on my to-dos:
Get modem in hand and install it. Get them connected to internet.
Get her music and video and picture editing software.
Load her HP scanner/printer (with handy linux drivers
She made sure when she got it)
Learn how to operate firewire and USB gear that she has.
Use next stable kernel (2.4.22?), or upgrade to beta kernel if necessary to do the above tasks.
Figure out if drivers exist for her firewire digital video camera that her parents bought her without any knowledge of computers and without consulting me :P
Experiment: Operation Girlfriend using linux
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