supermikenews

My views on software, programming, Linux, the Internet, government, taxation, working, and life.

Sunday, June 18, 2006

Getting Family Members on Linux


So I got my wife on Ubuntu Linux 5.10, got everything looking great and Win95-ish on her desktop (but cooler) so it's familiar to her, and now I want to replicate this desktop's GNOME theme settings, launchers, icons, and font settings on another desktop because it's so cool. How do I do that in the least amount of bytes and time?

Anyway, I got her on Linux by first getting her on Firefox and Thunderbird. Then, I proved to her that her system was getting hacked even though I had her going through an inbound firewall/NAT router and had her on Firefox and Thunderbird, as well as with safe proxy settings. It probably was when my kid downloaded and ran an EXE that did it, and one day we had the proxy down that would have prevented that. Anyway, I found a keystroke logger and that was enough.

So, when I switched her to Linux and chose Ubuntu, it was fairly straightforward for her.

She discovered that all her banking sites, as well as eBay, worked for her as well.

There's just not enough speed in OpenOffice yet, so I used Abiword and Gnumeric for her Word docs and Excel spreadsheets. I gave these Word and Excel icons to make her feel at home.