New Convert

I was down in Dundee at the weekend visiting a friend and knowing my interest in Linux she asked me about it, her first question being "How much does it cost". When I told her it was free she was very impressed and asked if I could install it on her computer. She had a very dated looking Windows XP set-up (I'm not sure it even had SP2 installed) and her major gripe was the fact that she couldn't install the new live messenger and being stuck with an old MSN Messenger app.

Ever keen to get new people to try Linux I asked her if she was ok with me installing an OS and completely getting rid of windows. She never really plays games with it other than solitaire and mainly just uses it for the Internet "The perfect candidate for Linux" I thought to myself. With complete trust in me she agreed and when I asked if she was sure at getting rid of windows before I hit the return key she said "yep Kill it!" and with that the hard drive was formatted to ext4 and XP annihilated.

I had a bit of trouble at first as I didn't have an Ubuntu install disk on me (I chose Ubuntu over any other distro as I figured it'd be best for a new convert). So I used her Windows to download the ISO only to find out that I couldn't get any app in the OS to burn the image to disk. I managed to overcome this, luckily I had a copy of pupy 4.0 live cd. There was only one optical drive so I had to run puppy from ram, once booted I mounted the windows Drive and was able to burn the Ubuntu image to CD.

Once it was all installed and I set it up for her (installed restricted extras, libdvdcss, aMSN, compiz, VLC etc.) I showed her a few things to get going and let her play about with it. The overall result was good, She was impressed with it saying "It's like I've got a new computer". The one thing she spent the most time on was aMSN (I told her about empathy but didn't seem interested) I noticed in one of her IM's her saying "I've got the new MSN messenger now". I didn't bother trying to explain the difference but it goes to show that from an end user's point of view Windows / Apple / Linux / BSD it's all the same and the underlying technology doesn't matter as long as it does what they expect it to do.

Open Source on Windows

As I can't have a fully functional system with Linux at the moment (till I convince my partner to allow a second tower in the house or I get around to buying an EeePC) I've had to settle with a few Open Source apps that I can run on Windows. I've downloaded a couple so far these are Open Office (OOo as it's referred to) and Pidgin. Of course there are many more Open Source apps out there but I've only gotten around to these two so far.

Open Office is similar to Microsoft Office, it has all the usual apps such as word processing, Spreadsheets, Database, PowerPoint and Drawing. The great thing about OOo is it works in the same way as the Microsoft version so it's simple to use you don't have to relearn everything, also you can open Microsoft documents with it and vice versa, it's compatible with most systems so you don't have to worry about converting files if you use OOo at home and Microsoft at work. The best thing about OOo compared to Microsoft is that it's FREE!!

Pidgin is a chat client that allows you to send instant messages using many existing clients so if you have more than one account you can bring them altogether using this one app. Pidgin works with these IM clients..........

AIM
Bonjour
Gadu-Gadu
Google Talk
Groupwise
ICQ
IRC
MSN
MySpaceIM
QQ
SILC
SIMPLE
Sametime
XMPP
Yahoo!
Zephyr

Both Open Office and Pidgin come already preinstalled with Linux OS so although I can't have the full version at the moment at least I can still have a taste of Open Source on Windows.

VM WHERE????????????????

I've had to install Ubuntu onto an older system. I'm a bit disappointed in this as all my files etc are on the new system and my partner won't allow me to....

A. have both systems in the house and

B. completely get rid of Windows on the newer system.

I tried a different route. I found out that you can download a free bit of software from VMware called VM Player. This allows you to create a virtual machine on your computer and allows you to run a different OS within your current system. So I thought cool! I logged onto the site and downloaded the software, once I had installed it everything seemed to be going fine but then the computer crashed (a Windows fault not Linux). I tried using it afterwards but it wouldn't work so I thought I'd uninstall and reinstall it.

After uninstalling VM Player I click on the program to reinstall and guess what happened. NOTHING that's what happened NOTHING HAPPENED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm still determined to use Linux, after playing with it on my older system I'm very impressed with it. What I'd like to do now is either get a cheap second hand Laptop with no OS installed or even with no HDD. Or there is the option of buying the new eeePC.