Benscomputer.no-ip.org - Fantastic News

My home is finally Windows free again, my partners laptop had held out for quite some time (apparantly Linux is too hard) but then Windows catastrophically destructed itself (decided not to connect to the network, and to add insult to injury demanded that I re-activate it.)

Lots of little tweaks later, Windows still wasn't receiving any traffic, it was happily sending it just not receiving the responses. No firewalls active on the system, no problems with the cable, but still nothing.

So I chucked a Linux disk in to check whether it was a hardware fault, or the OS. Instant network comms, so I gave her a choice. Either I re-install Windows and she can start learning to troubleshoot it when it gets itself in a mess, or she can go Open Source.

I got both wishes, she's going Linux, but wants to learn how to troubleshoot it!

So which Distro to use? I use Gentoo, but she found that too complex when she used it (my fault really, I prefer a CLI), so lets start with Knoppix 6

Interface is nice (I like LADE), and not too far from the Windows look and feel, 0wn ran reasonably easily (there were some partitioning issues) and the OS was installed within an hour.

Unfortunately, she doesn't like it. So on to Kubuntu (too lazy to apt-get KDE, and I wanted her to do an install).

Popped the disk into the tray, and told her to get on with installing. Got told where to go. But then she looked, and guess what, the install is oh so simple!

So we have Kubuntu running on the laptop now, and I think it is going to be very well received. When there's an issue, I can SSH in and sort it.

So thanks Windows, who'd have thought you would be responsible for driving yourself out of my home. We now have a working system, I can more happily and easily support it, and I won't have to bow down to your spurious activation requests any longer. The days when I could be bothered to work out exactly where you've gone wrong are gone.

Plus, there's a double bonus in all this. At least one person at work is considering Linux (without very much prompting) so I now have a beginner friendly laptop to demonstrate it on!!!!!