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This week I decided to splash out a bit on a new PC for my parents. Their previous PC was a painfully slow decrepit Windows ‘98 install which took about ten minutes to boot and often the mouse would freeze up (meaning that I would have to save whatever document they were editing using keyboard controls only and then reboot).

The new system is a eSys PC pre-installed with Ubuntu which comes with a keyboard mouse and speakers. I have been spent the afternoon preparing it for use.

Due to not wanting to make holes in walls I was forced to open it up immediately and install a wireless card which I nabbed from lifestream, one of my other boxen. Setting up the wireless card took most of the time, it didn’t have any native drivers so I had to use ndiswrapper to beat it into submission. I had managed to get the card working in it’s previous host but it was so long ago that I forgot what stuff I needed. I also forgot to add it to my access points MAC allow list preventing it from connecting until I figured out that what was stopping the DHCP from working was the access point rather than the card as I’d initially suspected.

My parents have only ever used Windows so I am trying to set the interface to look windowsy to help them become accustomed to using Linux. I removed the top gnome menu and put the applications where “Start” would be on windows. I also arranged their icons in the familiar windows layout, putting links to the home folder, trash can on the desktop along with “Web” and “Email” links (which on my dad’s user just runs firefox with the yahoo mail login as the page to load).

There are a few more things that need to be sorted before my parents are completely happy with it, the major one is the printer, a Lexmark X1150 (always complains it’s out of ink when it isn’t) which I’ve yet to get the printing or the copy functionality working.