So dear Missus decided to gift a laptop to her Papa on his 60th birthday. Ok it's his 62nd birthday and Madam decided to gift a laptop now. In all earnestness, I suggested that we gift a laptop loaded with Linux. After 3-4 weeks (actually months) of procrastinations and looking over Best Buy ads, we bought a Dell Inspiron 1525. I was surprised when the BestBuy guy mentioned that they would remove all the adware that came with Dell laptops and that would cost a cool $125. This is one of the reasons, I desist Windoze. So I installed Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04LTS). Installation was easy and I followed the guide here. I installed Google repos for Picasa. The webcam was fixed by installing ekiga and cheese. Skype was chosen as the medium for communicating with 10-month old grand daughter. [:P] BTW Skype worked out of the box. I had some problems with the microphone/speaker and that was fixed using the instructions given here. Last but not least I also got the S-video to work by reading this instruction/post on ubuntuforums.org
I also made a small presentation/manual on how to use the essential features. I hope that this experiment pays off. At least they won't be bothered with viruses, spyware, ad ware, etc. and can use their laptop to chat with their grand daughter here. I deserve a pat on the back for 1. making Linux OS an alternative to Windoze for them, so that they won't miss having Windoze, 2. making Open Source software flourish.
No comments:
Post a Comment