Re: Howto to double or triple the ubuntu community: convert your parents!!
Get my father to use Ubuntu? I can't even get him to use Windows - he still uses his old iMac for everything. Whenever he goes to a website that doesn't work properly because it isn't compatible with IE 5, he sends an e-mail to the webmaster telling them that there's something wrong with their website. Seriously!
My father once asked me if I'd uninstalled Windows from my computer. Apparantly, he had turned the computer on, went off and put the kettle on, GRUB timed out, and he came back to find that Ubuntu had booted. He restarted, went back to the kitchen for a sandwich...
And another time, I left my computer on overnight to work as a web server. I had turned off X and was at a virtual terminal with information still showing. The following morning, my father came up to me and announced that he'd restarted my computer "because it had crashed".
One of the proposed new features of Gnome 3 is automatic file translation. The idea is that, if you change a filename extension from (say) .jpg to .png, Gnome will actually convert the file from a JPEG to a PNG. Well, my father once tried to convert AIFFs to WAVs in this way in Windows.
The spooky thing? He's been using computers longer than I have, and once owned a command-line-based computer.
As regards using Ubuntu for online radio and the like, the focus of this thread is about setting up Ubuntu for someone else. The assumption is that you'd set up the person's Ubuntu with all the codecs.
Last edited by 3rdalbum; September 11th, 2006 at 03:08 PM.
Reason: Clarified the "because it had crashed" story
I try to treat the cause, not the symptom. I avoid the terminal in instructions, unless it's easier or necessary. My instructions will work within the Ubuntu system, instead of breaking or subverting it. Those are the three guarantees to the helpee.
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