6 Jul 2002 goingware   » (Master)

Turning Families On To Free Software

Well, I finally completed installing Debian Woody on my brother-in-law Bruce's computer. I left Bruce's Mozilla's home page set to the Linux Cookbook. I had planned to write up a more detailed web page of help to leave with him but won't get the time before I leave to return to Maine on Sunday.

However, it's OK because Bruce and Brenda and their daughters are driving down in a week to visit with us in Maine.

The main applications I installed were Nautilus, Mozilla, AbiWord, Grip, the GIMP, Emacs, Gnumeric and Evolution. I'd never seen Nautilus before and I must say in the short time I was able to play with it, it looked pretty nice. I also installed GDM as a session manager. Here's a tip - don't allow GDM or XDM to install before you've got X working, or you'll have a hard time getting control of your machine back! I had encountered that before, and downloaded just xserver-xfree86 and xterm (and their dependencies) before installing GDM.

I also downloaded a few Free as in Speech and Free as in Beer windows programs, installed them on Bruce's windows partition, and today installed them on my other brother-in-law Clyde's computer. AbiWord and Mozilla again, but also Speak Freely, a most excellent internet telephony program. The new release is GPL, previously it was public domain.

I got Speak Freely set up and tested on Clyde's computer (Clyde is my niece Denika's father - remember I recently taught Denika HTML) and rang up a helpful fellow named Johann in Germany to demonstrate to Clyde how he could talk long distance for free over the net. He was pretty impressed with this.

One version of Speak Freely runs as a native Win32 application, and the other runs on various *nix platforms, including Linux. Try it!

Finally, we brought up an old pentium-II system of mine for my mother-in-law to use. She's never used a computer before. Bonita got her intrigued by showing her how she could shop for clothes on Sears Canada's website. (The U.S. Sears website was a disaster last time I tried, but Sears Canada is a really good site). Then Bonita taught her to use email. Now she's corresponding regularly with two of her daughters, one of whom (Darlene) lives very far away, in Texas, and the other (Brenda) just in the next town over.

When Bonita wasn't looking, I installed Mozilla, AbiWord and Speak Freely on her mother's computer. I got caught next time Mom turned it on. I explained that I wanted her to have them to use when she got more comfortable with the computer (which runs Windows 98) but I wouldn't be here to install them for her.

She and my father in law are also coming down to Maine, so maybe I will get to show Mom how to use Speak Freely from there.

So I have installed GPL and Open Source software, including one full-featured debian installation, on computers belonging to three different families, and have gotten two of them actively interested in using it. I think when Mom is comfortable with Speak Freely (which is pretty scary for novices to use) she'll really enjoy calling up her two daughters (my wife being one of them) in the far away USA without having to pay long distance bills.

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