Fun With Desktops - Xubuntu

I mentioned in the last post that I was planning to install Ubuntu on my desktop. Turns out that I would install Xubuntu first, on a different machine.

Somehow I talked my 12 year old daughter into it. She has the hand-me-down machine of the household: 600MHz processor with 192MB memory. While she has been running XP, it has been dog slow, and errors were beginning to pop up. It was time to reload XP, but I asked her for two weeks to try Linux, and she agreed.

Running from the LiveCD, Xubuntu was even slower than XP. But once the install was done, it ran great! She only runs about five things, so the setup was quick. We've been an open source family for applications for a while now, so she is already used to Firefox, Thunderbird, and GAIM (this is the most important app for her). After running the Automatix2 script, I had music and video working. I haven't shown her yet how to play music and videos, so we haven't picked any tools for that yet.

Her biggest issue was MS Office. Her classes use it at school, and she wants to be able to move documents back and forth. After installing Open Office, I found how to set the default file formats to the MS layout, so I'm hoping that works for her (we haven't tried this either).

The only other software I had to install was smbfs support so that she could access the family file server. apt-get install smbfs did the trick.

We're almost done with the two weeks, and I haven't heard one complaint or request yet.