My dad gave me a simple goal: get sound to work on my parents’ Windows XP computer. After 3 hours of foolishness (and an unusable XP installation), in went the Fedora 11 Live CD.
About 30 minutes later, the whole family is on Linux. So far so good. Full hardware support for everything right out of the box (including stuff that never worked on Windows, like sound and the back/forward buttons on the side of the Microsoft mouse). There’s now DSL out here in the sticks so a full update was feasible. It took a while with high speeds of 80kb/s, but that’s better than their 15 years of dial-up getting 2kb/s. Some quick fiddling: remove Evolution, Cheese, GIMP, and other things, install media support (Flash and MP3 support and things), and put Eyes in the top Gnome panel. I am very happy with how usable Fedora is on this old machine, it’s faster than XP was too. And, it’s easier for me to maintain remotely.
I had some issues installing RealPlayer 11, which they need for old Prairie Home Companion episodes. This post helped me out.
[...] Short tale of a use switching to #Fedora from Windows at http://www.wampuscat.org/wordpress/2009/07/01/switching-to-fedora/ [...]
Pingback by rahulsundaram's status on Thursday, 02-Jul-09 04:49:53 UTC - Identi.ca — 2009/07/01 @ 23:50