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Heliode
March 14th, 2005, 02:10 AM
Hello everyone!

I thought a rant about how well Ubuntu worked out for me would be a refreshing change from the issues you normally get on support forums, so here goes nothing!

First a bit of introduction; I've been running GNU/Linux in general, and Ubuntu in particular for a while now. Long ago I started with Redhat, then Mandrake, followed by Gentoo (which still runs my PC and my server) and lately Ubuntu on my crappy old laptop, practically granting it a new life in terms of functionality.

but onto the topic at hand; Friday afternoon (around 12:00, got home from school early for a change) my girlfriend calls me to say that her "damn computer is at it again" in the sense that it had suddenly gained the feature to automatically supply her and her family with advertisements (again..). Needless to say, at this point the machine ran Windows (XP).
This happened before, so I told my gf that I had a solution that would get rid of the problem once and for all; install Ubuntu on it. Now, my gf knew a bit about the "whole Linux thing" from what she watched me use, and she already thought it was pretty cool, but she (let alone her family) had little to no experience using it, so it was a bit of a gamble. Also I was a bit unsure if I could meet all their demands about what it should be able to do. However, spending hours ridding their box of spyware every month or so didn't seem like a plan either, so I decided to go ahead with it.

I already had a "warty warthog" cd around, so I grabbed it and went over to my gf's place. After preparing the partitions I start the installation, which was incredibly quick compared to Windows XP. I might add that the machine in question is a Pentium III 733 mhz with 384 of memory and a 20 gb hard disk.
After the installation, I let Ubuntu do its updates. They have a small home network (the machine in question, a laptop and a router) so connecting to the Internet was the easiest thing ever; it worked completely automatically.

After the whole installation sequence the machine boots into X, I log in, and everything works perfectly. The first thing I do is set languages to Dutch (with some help from a great Ubuntu Wiki article) for Gnome itself, Firefox and OpenOffice (menus, spell checker, etc). Although I like to think I'm pretty good at English, my gf & family prefer to have their pc in Dutch so this helped a lot.
I set up a few icons so she could access shared folders on their laptop, as well as links to her documents on the Windows partition (fat32, luckily).
I already had them on Firefox / Thunderbird on Windows, so I just import those profiles and viola.
Next, printer. I had some bad experiences with printers + Linux, so I was getting a bit worried here. No need though. Ubuntu immediately recognized that it was there, and after installing the driver it worked just fine. Phew!
Even her brothers MP3 player/flash drive worked without changing a setting. I was so surprised by this that I decided to give the thing a stress-test; I plug in my Logitech V500, my 128 mb pen drive, my 128 mb mmc card (into their external USB cardreader) and their MP3 player all at once. All worked immediately and without problem, even my V500's touch pad scroll-thing! (being used to Gentoo, I didn't expect anything like this).

It was 17:00 when everything was finished. I remember it took me two days to get Windows XP installed and running correctly with all additional applications like MS Office, virus scanner, firewall, antispyware, diskkeeper, and other windows crazythings. And now, I got their machine running in one afternoon with an OS that, not too long ago, was considered by many to not be fit for desktop use. Well I can tell you, it most certainly is with Ubuntu!

Now they can safely and easily surf the web, email, IM, edit photos, write stuff and whatnot. The only thing they can't do with it compared to Windows is play (most) games, but they're not into that anyway so they didn't care.

They've been working with it all weekend now. I set up Remote Desktop just in case, but I haven't needed it yet. It "Just Works(tm)", and very well! Right now my gf's dad is asking himself why they ever used Windows in the first place.

I'm sure a lot of people have had similar experiences. Please post them if you feel like it!

jeffjj
March 15th, 2005, 04:04 AM
What a fun read! I really love Ubuntu. I know what you mean about recognizing the devices. I have an Epson CX5400 three in one printer. Neither Mandrake or SUSE could configure it. If I selected the C84 printer I could get it to print, but even then the margins were always off. When I moved to Ubuntu the printer worked perfectly. Then just for the heck of it I tried the scanner...it was so funny because I pressed the button fully expecting the same error saying how it could not find any devices...and I about fell off my chair when it just worked.

I have a non-technical friend that really is digging the Ubuntu. He has a $1500.00 laptop that has XP loaded on it and he hates it...very sick of all the crap that comes with owning a Windows PC. So instead he computes on his 850 Mhz desktop with a copy of Ubuntu that I loaded on for him.

kassetra
March 15th, 2005, 04:08 AM
WOW! What an adventure! LOL

Thank you so much for sharing! :)

zenwhen
March 15th, 2005, 04:15 AM
Ubuntu has been much the same for me.

TravisNewman
March 15th, 2005, 04:30 AM
It's the fact that this DOES happen that will bring Ubuntu, and Linux in general, to the forefront of computing in coming years.

Thanks for your story! We love hearing the successes as well as helping with the failures.

jeffjj
March 15th, 2005, 04:54 AM
Let me put this into perspective in a different way. I am so impressed with Ubuntu it finally pushed me over the edge to learn how to program with the GTK+ tookkit and learn GNOME programming. My profession is developing Java web applications, but now my nighttime job is learning GTK+ :). The lights are finally coming on all the way! I have created some little applications to learn how to program...nothing worth putting in the Ubuntu repositories...yet anyway :). I am very impressed on how strong the GTK+ toolkit is!

nocturn
March 15th, 2005, 09:55 AM
Hi

Thanks for posting your experience.

How did you get Gnome in Dutch? I'm trying to do that for my parents, but it is not working (It says Dutch/Belgium is not installed).
I did the basic install in English.

Cybermagellan
March 15th, 2005, 10:23 AM
Dude for number 1 stop looking at porn on her computer :-P Sorry I have WindowsXP and keep a very clean system. With one virus scan (yes I know one too many) and one firewall. As far as devices *sigh* I'll rain on your parade.

1. Windows works perfectly on my machine
2. Ubuntu while I have used HOARY I now have to go back to WARTY because of this whole NVIDA thing everyone is having problems with as well as Linux thinking my computer runs monitoring software for the temperature (which it doesn't) which causes it to crash.

Don't get me wrong I really love ubuntu from what I have gotten to use of it but yes I am going 3 days without sleep trying to figure out what is happening. But it is all part of the fun and enjoyment outa it. Congrats on converting your girlfriend over to linux....now you can come over to my place and get it to work on my system and I'll be happy

ubuntu_demon
March 15th, 2005, 10:26 AM
Hi,

I am also dutch. ( prefer using english on computers). I'm going to create two ubuntu boxes.One is for my father and one for a friend of his. These boxes do need to be dutch.see : http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=19774

So I'm interested in your problems/experiences with getting dutch n00bs running Ubuntu.

I also would like to know how much english is still left in Ubuntu hoary dutch.

Slapdash
March 15th, 2005, 11:08 AM
YOu said you had Firefox and Thunderbird on Windows?

Why then did you have so much SPAM / Adware?

just wondering as i've never recieved any adware while using Firefox.

nocturn
March 15th, 2005, 11:42 AM
Hi,

I am also dutch. ( prefer using english on computers). I'm going to create two ubuntu boxes.One is for my father and one for a friend of his. These boxes do need to be dutch.see : http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=19774

So I'm interested in your problems/experiences with getting dutch n00bs running Ubuntu.

I also would like to know how much english is still left in Ubuntu hoary dutch.

Hello Demon666_nl

Do you happen to know what I need to install to get the Gnome interface in Dutch?

Thanks

J D Wijbenga
March 15th, 2005, 12:32 PM
For more information on Ubuntu in Dutch see:
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/UbuntuNederlandsEr
http://www.lacocina.nl/artikelen/ubuntu-nederlands.html

Good luck,

JD

nocturn
March 15th, 2005, 01:35 PM
For more information on Ubuntu in Dutch see:
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/UbuntuNederlandsEr
http://www.lacocina.nl/artikelen/ubuntu-nederlands.html

Good luck,

JD


Thank you, but both guides deal with getting OO, Evolution and FireFox in Dutch (which is good). But I'm still looking how to get Gnome in dutch first.

Heliode
March 15th, 2005, 05:45 PM
Hey, thanks for al the responses! It was good to see my story was well received!
To get most of the system in Dutch from the beginning I selected Dutch at the very beginning of the installation, right before it asks you what kind of keyboard you have and where you live. Other than that i've used the info at the URL's J D Wijbenga posted.

About the spyware; allthough the amount of spyware they were getting decreased greatly after having them use FF/TB, I suspect they installed crapware like MSN Plus with the default options (which loads you up with a nice and complete collection of shopping assistants, probably as well as enabling services to generously store your personal information off-site. I ran Hitman Pro (which essentially just runs Adaware, Spybot S&D, CWShredder and some other stuff in one big macro) and even trial versions of more professional software like SpySubtract, but they just kept getting pop-ups with ads (Internet Explorer windows mind you, not Firefox ;) )

I did give them the option to boot to their Windows system, although to my knowledge they haven't had to do so.

I've never tried installing a scanner on Linux. Now that I know it worked out for at least one of you, I might try to do so.

Furthermore, if I can get my dads television tuner to work with Ubuntu, i'd have him converted long ago. Any pointers there? At one point the thing DID work with SuSE and Gentoo, but very unstably. It's practically the only reason he's not using Linux full-time.


Another thing I feel I have to say, is how impressed I am with Crossover Office (http://www.codeweavers.com/). I'm using the trial version right now and I really believe it's worth buying, and I probably will do so soon. I use it to run Internet Explorer (for those sites that really, really don't work with FF), Photoshop 7, Quicktime Player (even works as plugin in firefox so I can watch movie trailers) and the whole Studio MX (Dreamweaver, Firefox, Flash...). Allthough it has a growing database of software it officually supports, there's a lot of stuff that will simply work with it. For example, the Delphi 7 programming enviroment (which I need for school). Imagine that; running a programming enviroment for Windows applications on Linux! I know WinE can probably also do most of this, but Crossover Office has a nice graphical front-end, manages file extentions (so opening a Photoshop file from your file manager will launch Photoshop) and lets you graphically add/remove programs.
I'm not intending 'advertise' this program here, but i'd just like to point out how well this would help people crossing over to a better place. ( :-D )

Furthermore; I think I can savely say that once Openoffice 2.0 comes out, Windows's days will be numbered. At least, the days when you just NEEDED to use it. There's a preview version out, as well as tons of screenshots here (http://www.openoffice.org/screenshots/ooo20/index.html). Check it out!

Two other projects to watch, are Cedega (http://www.transgaming.com/) and Klik (http://klik.berlios.de/). I believe that, in the comming years, these will play a significant part in bringing GNU/Linux to the average Joe.

Another issue remains, though, for me to be completely happy with Ubuntu. I need something to get my webcam (Logitech Quickcam) working, and an instant messenging client that supports the MSN protocol to use it with. That's about the only thing I can't do with my laptop now that I could when I still used Windows.

Sorry for the brain dump, but I just thought it could be relevant to someone, somewhere! ;)

ubuntu_demon
March 15th, 2005, 06:50 PM
Hello Demon666_nl

Do you happen to know what I need to install to get the Gnome interface in Dutch?

Thanks
No I don't. Im running english here. In a couple of weeks I'm gonna install hoary in dutch. I hope it's an option during the installation.

jkka
March 15th, 2005, 08:56 PM
Do you happen to know what I need to install to get the Gnome interface in Dutch?



You have tried this?
1. sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales
2. select the language you want
3. reboot (dont know if logout&login is enough, propably is)
4. in login screen select the language before logging in
5. tell us if that did the trick

Heliode
March 15th, 2005, 09:54 PM
Update:

Another succes!

I just booted the Hoary preview live-cd (AMD64 version) on my dads computer, and got the tv tuner running in no time with tvtime! After showing him the other cool features Ubuntu / Gnome have to offer, I convinced him to switch to Ubuntu as well! This is also because he's been looking for a 64 bit OS to make use of his AMD64.
I'll install Hoary on his PC tomorrow evening! Wish me luck! :-D

Slapdash
March 16th, 2005, 01:41 PM
Good luck, but somehow I think you are gonna be ok.

linducky
December 18th, 2005, 02:40 AM
Ubuntu while I have used HOARY I now have to go back to WARTY because of this whole NVIDA thing everyone is having problems with as well as Linux thinking my computer runs monitoring software for the temperature (which it doesn't) which causes it to crash.

this was a small problem for me but i goit it fixed eventually thanks to the help of somewherw on the net?
did al work out well for you?

newbie2
January 30th, 2006, 02:17 PM
here is a translation (from Dutch to English) of the beginning of this article (sorry if i translated it bad)-->

26/01/2006
ICT on school launches first standards desktop

press bulletin of foundation ICT on school

The Hague, 26 January 2006

The foundation ICT on school with information on open standards has made an information parcel (notebook with DVD) for education . The open standards desktop is part of this information parcel. With this desktop software can be tried out in a simple manner for making material in open standards. The open standards desktop is a desktop on the basis of Ubuntu Linux.
http://www.ictopschool.net/nieuws/pers/Persbericht.2006-01-26.0450
:cool: