[NBLUG/talk] Linux for an AOL addict?

Christopher Wagner chrisw at pacaids.com
Thu Jul 21 08:45:58 PDT 2005


Well it sounds pretty cut and dry to me, and a golden opportunity.  She
has a decision to make, her decision, to either pay out the money to
replace her old computer, or to give Linux a shot, that puts the ball in
her court and doesn't put Linux or you in a position of being "at fault"
for "disrupting her environment".  Don't make any grandeous promises,
just offer it as a solution for her to try.

Here's what I would propose:

Give her the option of one or the other.  Don't promise her great things
from it, but suggest that she has an opportunity to extend the life of
her current computer with no commitment (most people hate having to
spend money to replace something that should still be functioning
well).  She may ask if you really believe it's a viable option, state
that you work at home exclusively (or almost, I dunno exactly what your
OS situation is) in Linux and truly enjoy working with it, but that the
decision is truly hers.  Above all, don't try to persuade or convince
her.  If she shows some interest, offer to show her a laptop or another
computer with Linux running on it, or perhaps just take a Live CD over
to her computer and demonstrate how her computer runs with Linux, point
out that if not booting from CD, it starts up quicker.  Demonstrate some
basic tasks, word processing, web, etc..  Above all, don't try to
persuade her, simply provide it as an option.

If she decides to give it a shot, I would find a cheap or free no
commitment dial-up provider (there's plenty of other relatively cheap
dial-up ISPs) for her to use while she's trying Linux.  I even might be
able to find a dial-up account you can use in the short-term if you need
it.  You can then have her retrieve her AOL email via the AOL website or
via some other mail client (AOL supports IMAP).

Then, pick some relatively clean and easy-to-use distro (Ubuntu isn't a
bad choice, IMHO), image her hard drive (and back up her documents and
such seperately too, for easy restore to the new partition), then
reformat and install the distro of choice.  Restore all her documents
and such to an easy to find location and give her a little paper map of
the directory structure relevant to her home directory..  Make sure she
can find her home directory if she needs to, because she will certainly
find a way to navigate out of her "sandbox" and will get flustered
quickly.  If there's any procedures that require more than 2-3 steps for
her to do a task, make sure she writes it down, or write it down
yourself using extruciating details to identify where something might be
on the screen.

It's also important that she knows the name of each application she's
using and what it's purpose is.  That should be easy to have as a little
list next to the computer.  It's also important to pay attention to
things she may be having difficulties with, she may not show outwardly
how frustrated she is with it, if you can find a simpler way to do it.

Anyway, that's probably way more advice than you needed, but I hope it
helps.  Best of luck! :)

- Chris

Lincoln Peters wrote:

>On Wed, 2005-07-20 at 12:47 -0700, thiessen at sonic.net wrote:
>  
>
>>OTOH, the rest of us on the list (presumably) don't know this person. 
>>Lincoln is the only person who knows her well enough to make the call on
>>whether the outcome is promising enough for him to make the effort.  I
>>know that I'm just projecting my own experiences with people so wedded to
>>their own particular setups that they reject anything unfamiliar out of
>>hand.  If (as I think Walter wrote) she just wants to keep her AOL email
>>address then perhaps it's not a big deal.
>>    
>>
>
>The situation is that she intends to buy a new computer, and it's
>obvious to me (and I'm sure it's obvious to you) that if the new
>computer is also running Windows, she'll have the same problems that she
>had on the old computer.  If she really thinks that she needs a new
>computer every time it slows down and becomes unusable, the statistics
>I've seen would indicate that she'll need a new computer every 20
>minutes!
>
>What I would like to do is suggest that she let me install Linux on her
>old computer, see how well it works, and then she can re-evaluate her
>decision to buy a new computer.  However, it sounds like a bit of social
>engineering may be required first: I'd need to make her understand that
>just because it's different doesn't mean it's inferior (that probably
>won't be too hard; I think she got started with computers in the DOS
>era), and I'd need to wean her off of AOL (that may be hard).  I'm still
>not sure if that is possible.
>
>---
>Lincoln Peters
><sampln at sbcglobal.net>
>
>Confirmed bachelor:
>	A man who goes through life without a hitch.
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>talk mailing list
>talk at nblug.org
>http://nblug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
>  
>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: chrisw.vcf
Type: text/x-vcard
Size: 181 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://nblug.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20050721/2e7be0e6/chrisw.vcf


More information about the talk mailing list