Laptops :: Setting up HP Pavillion zt1170



I'm not sure where this might be more at home.  It is a laptop question, though.

He uses computer at work for email and web, I think.  She's afraid of them.

He threatens to buy one and goes shopping for time to time; but so far has been unwilling to come off the money.  Considering it would be a Windows machine from a big box store, I think that's a good thing.

I have an HP Pavillion zt 1170, 1133 MHz, 256 (240) MB laptop that I intend to send them.  It came in 2000 with XP Home, (I'm the second owner), on which it pretty well chokes.  

They live in Texas.  I live in Tennessee.  I'm not sure how much help the family close to them would be.  I want to set up something rock-solid reliable and at least reasonably secure enough for them to use it for email and to swap baby/kid's pictures over the web without the usual Windows malware magnet problems.

Perhaps I should explain a bit of background. I played around a little with DOS and Pascal in college.  But that has been nearly 20 years and I have forgotten what little I know.  Today I'd hate to have to write even a .bat file cold the last time I opened an XP pseudo "DOS", I could barely remember enough commands to do what I needed.

I didn't own a computer until 2003 and used only one variation or another of Windows at work and at home.  I despise it.  My victimization by Win98 and XP led me to investigate Linux and BSD for fear that Longhorn/Vista/MuchAdoAbout LongOverdueNothing would be even worse and that I had better have an exit plan.

But until recently, no GNU/Linux distro has been remotely suited to beginners and non-geeks.  Did I mention that I discovered early on that i didn't want to be a programmer and changed majors?  What I know about Linux is that I don't know much more than how to pronounce it correctly and that the common mispronunciation sounds better to my non-Scandinavian ears.

I thought of MEPIS.  I really the fact that I could send the book with MEPIS, but it doesn't want to finish an installation.  So I considered Xubuntu - companion books are available, although I don't know how beginner-friendly.  I'm currently running a wallpaper off of the Puppy Linux website, but am still not convinced it's the best option. Although it is entirely possible that what I have in mind might end up very similar to fat puppy distro.

At the point when I started to think that MEPIS might be too large and that I might use Xubuntu instead, I started thinking that there is no need to stop there.  At this moment, I am thinking about DSL with Fluxbox in an attempt to go as lightweight as possible with the basic distro and just add the applications, and dependencies, that I think will fill their needs best.  

For instance, OpenOffice may seem like bloatware in DSL circles, but it ran reasonably well on that machine with Windows XP Pro. I'm thinking that it should cook with DSL, (or Xubuntu).

Does anyone have any recommendations, tips or warnings?
Phew (big post, big topic!)

It so happens I'm thinking about all of these issues at the moment.

Certainly you could run dsl's remastering tool and place the desired extensions on dsl's cd - these will load automatically so that part will be seamless for them. Open Office runs well on dsl but it does need more fonts - there were a few posts about that recently.  With a bit of effort you can set it up to be a good web/file sharing/basic office light distro ready to go.

That said, dsl is usually a confusing and frustrating experience for first-time non-geek Windows-only users.  They look for the "start" menu; they assume there is no internet because they can't find IE; they try to drag and drop things that don't do anything if you drag and drop them.  Setting up printers and wireless is a newbies nightmare.  This type of thing.  There is a learning curve and a culture shock, and there pretty much is for any linux distro as well.  Dsl's is more severe because of the spartan desktop environment and its practical limitations (which geeks see as plus).

Recently I introduced a friend to dsl who is a fairly seasoned windows user, mainly with games, but he will tackle problems on windows that most users will not.  So he is computer literate, as this is defined my MS.  I spent quite a bit of time remastering dsl, hacking confiurations and writing a setup script in /opt/bootloca.sh,  and setting up the apps he wanted most so nothing would need configuration: ipw2200 wireless, xine, prozgui, filesharing etc.

While he loves the speed and safety of surfing and downloading with dsl, last night he said "I hate those script things!"  He'd been trying to edit some files and build an extension without knowing what he was doing (good; that's how we all started).  But his tolerance for frustration is less than mine, so I hope he does not lose interest.

I have another friend, very MS literate, who has installed Madriva and loves it - it has most things you want ready to go without doing anything, and it's KDE environment is a lot lighter and snappier than my Fedora's.  He has had problems though trying to compile usb wireless drivers - again, a first timer. I discovered he'd installed slightly different kernel sources to what he was actually running (labelling so similar you could hardly tell - I had to look at the Makefile to work this out).  The package manager had  let him do this.  I wanted to fix it but he gave up and was buying another broadband box instead!

BTW if you perservere your old college training will stand you in good stead - it's buroed in your head somewhere.  You'll find things like an interactive bash shell quite wonderful after the awfulness of DOS. And Pascal was designed as a teaching language to give students a strong foundation in programming and data structures and it does just that - I learned Pascal back then too.  Though I never use it, the patterns it embued now come back in the form of bash, perl, C etc. (It's very much back in fashion for eg games programming too).

Just a few thought on an empty stomach :=)
Alot depends on the new user's prior experience.

My neighbor is 68 years young and never owned a computer. Her daughter gave her a hand-me-down Windows machine. She had nothing but problems with it. The daughter got tired of comming over to re-load Windows, and got tired of her Mom calling asking "what do I do now?"

Now, my neighbor knows that I "do computers", so she turned to me. I won't touch a Windows box, but I told her that she could "try"  DSL

Given she only does webmail and surf the web. But she is now on two years and brags that she does not have the problems that our other senior friends have with Windows. Her favorite thing is the digital family pictures that come in her email. She is ready to buy a digital camera to use with DSL.

She often thanks me for she does alot of email with friends and relatives. She used to watch alot of TV. Now she looks forward to the hours of reading and answering emails.

She tells her two grandsons that "Granny does Linux"

Much depends on expectations, past experiences, and actual daily use.

Just as the new user could not easily install and setup Windows. If one sets up DSL for the intended use, the new user can enjoy and use DSL.
Quote (WDef @ Feb. 27 2007,05:58)
Certainly you could run dsl's remastering tool and place the desired extensions on dsl's cd - these will load automatically so that part will be seamless for them. Open Office runs well on dsl but it does need more fonts - there were a few posts about that recently.  With a bit of effort you can set it up to be a good web/file sharing/basic office light distro ready to go.

That said, dsl is usually a confusing and frustrating experience for first-time non-geek Windows-only users.  They look for the "start" menu; they assume there is no internet because they can't find IE; they try to drag and drop things that don't do anything if you drag and drop them.  Setting up printers and wireless is a newbies nightmare.  This type of thing.  There is a learning curve and a culture shock, and there pretty much is for any linux distro as well.  Dsl's is more severe because of the spartan desktop environment and its practical limitations (which geeks see as plus).


I think there are a couple simple things that might make this quite feasible for jd's relatives without remastering.

First, JWM is a lot more "familiar" to most people than fluxbox since it has the menu button in the corner, clock on the right, and they can switch easily between maximized apps by clicking their way through the task bar. Second, switch the icons to rox-filer's pinboard because they're a hell of a lot easier to manage (no need to figure out coordinates when adding new non-DSL apps) and they allow drag and drop within rox as well as with compatible applications. It's also fairly easy to add menu entries to switch between pinboards so both the aunt and uncle could have unique icon sets while remaining user dsl.

You're right, too, that configuration is going to be the biggest hurdle for folks who aren't technically inclined. Fortunately, that's usually a one-shot concern. Unfortunately, it can be also be a futile or daunting enough task for some to throw in the towel.

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...I have another friend, very MS literate, who has installed Madriva and loves it - it has most things you want ready to go without doing anything, and it's KDE environment is a lot lighter and snappier than my Fedora's.

There are plenty of distros that are GUI-oriented with excellent hardware detection and automagic set-up: Ubuntu and its derivatives, Mepis, Kanotix, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, etc. Using one of them wouldn't require remastering or reinventing the wheel, especially since each has "lite" or "liter" versions. DSL can also be made very easy for those transitioning from other operating systems (especially configuring it to operate in a familiar fashion as I suggested above).

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They live in Texas.

We have some very strong LUGs here in central Texas.

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I thought of MEPIS.  I really the fact that I could send the book with MEPIS, but it doesn't want to finish an installation...At the point when I started to think that MEPIS might be too large and that I might use Xubuntu instead, I started thinking that there is no need to stop there

Which version? What's it doing (or not doing)? I don't think Mepis is "bloated" at all. I know there are people here who have a knee-jerk objection to the size of KDE's libraries, but the trade-off is fully justified if you run K-apps. One person's bloat is another person's function. Cobbling together "light" applications atop an agnostic window manager doesn't necessarily reduce memory footprint if the apps they'll use don't share the same libraries. Duplication of function in a cobbled system is just as "bloated" as the larger size of a library that underlies all apps than run on top of it. It's not the initial base size that's important, but how the sum works together in practice. Try running Open Office, Firefox, and Thunderbird on any window manager (or even XFCE since it doesn't have native applications like K does) and then compare your memory use to running K-apps like K-Office, Konqueror, and KMail on KDE.
http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/memory/desktop_benchmark.html

I also think the seamless operation of K-apps shouldn't be overlooked, especially considering the end users and their level of tech savvy: K-app A works with K-app B which works with K-app C and so on. Your aunt and uncle would have a full suite of integrated drag and drop apps, a menu and task bar that's at least fairly familiar to them, and depending which distro you choose they'd be able to manage any peripherals they may end up adding down the road without any (or much) hassle.

I'm running Mepis Lite (3.3.2-1 using kernel 2.4.29 -- pre-Ubuntu switch) partition on a 400mhz/128 MB RAM computer right now, on which I usually run DSL. One of the main differences between Mepis and Mepis Lite is the former has Open Office and the latter has K-Office. I have about 20 tabs open in Konqueror, with KMail, Akregator, and Kontact running (the former two are basically the same program as the latter since they all work out of Kontact: that's the beauty of sharing the same libs and GUI), editing a report in KWord/KSpread (sharing the same KOffice interface), and listening to a CD using KsCD. There's a bit of swap paging, but it's not stalling or sluggish.

original here.