Salut,
SinnerBOFH

For the past year I have been the “tech support” of an elderly lady
with no prior computer experience living in the Finnish woods. She
wanted to get on the net for email and banking, so I supplied her with
a 2nd hand Thinkpad with Mandriva on it (I discussed some issues with
its video on Mandriva forums last spring, and got a response from
you). “Living in the woods” is to be taken literally here. Net is by a
GPRS dongle, and not even the best speed attainable by it (depends on
where she puts the laptop in the house). Mostly this has gone well,
even though I can visit her rarely and support is by phone. I’m not sure
if this counts as a properly controlled environment. I guess it does: she
does not install new programs, change the setup, or even know the root
password.

The problems encountered are the same we would have seen with Windows or
Mac: Learning just the basic concepts of using mouse, buttons and
menues has been surprisingly nontrivial problem. Or the concept of
using separate programs. It helped a lot I could automate totally
opening the net over the GPRS. And I can sleep easy knowing she wont be
hit by Windows viruses and trojans. Phishing risk remains, but she
has healthy suspicions, and I have told here to never give any
personal details to web forms or email responses. The teaching
experience has been very educational for me, too, a long-time computer
user. Even easy-to-use GUI systems take a lot for granted!

Another take-home message is that for many people, the home computer
OS has very similar requirements to an enterprise OS: Stability. it
should never crash, and updates should never cause problems, because
time spent updating and sorting any problems in it is time taken away
from the real purpose of the computer. A “RHEL for home computers”
might be exactly what many people really need, although selling it to
them would be impossible, because it is not “sexy”. Like selling
porridge. I think the more stable Mandriva releases come close to
this kind of home distribution.

There is just one slight problem in the Linux setup: occasionally X11
and KDM won’t start when the machine starts. I have taugh here how to
get around this by logging-in in the text mode, and issuing a reboot
command. This helps, and she can do it from memory, but it is not nice
that it is needed. I suspect this must be a kind of race condition in the
startup, because it does not happen always, so perhaps a “sleep”
inserted somewhere in the startup scripts might cure it? Any other
ideas? (The version is Mandriva 2008.0 One with some updates. The
problem actually got more common after an update run in the autumn).