I had some reservations about writing this story up at all. A friend at work found an old discarded HP pavilion on the side of the road, fired it up and couldn’t log in as Administrator because somebody (smart) had changed the normally default [blank] password for that account. He had already asked several PC-smart folks to help him get in somehow to no avail, and had finally decided to impose on me. I love a challenge, and I thought it would be easy, so I hooked the machine up to my KVM at my work desk. I had some ideas about how to go about it, and as usual it included Linux.

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The big local story lately in Newsday was that the Suffolk County (NY) Clerk’s office was posting land use records and other public documents online, and that those documents may have resident’s signatures and social security numbers on them. There is another story, less obvious but potentially more dangerous in the long run - the information going online is only accessible by Microsoft Windows users.I, like many Suffolk residents went online in short order after reading the Newsday story to see if my online documents revealed anything personal. A signature and a social security number are a healthy step forward if you’re planning some identity theft, so this was a big concern to a lot of folks.
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As reported on CNET’s news.com, Microsoft’s patent claims for their older file storage system called FAT (file allocation table) have been ruled valid after all. This is probably not surprising since it is well known that the FAT system was developed for MS-DOS in 1977 by Bill Gates and Marc McDonald, but it may have serious consequences for Linux vendors like Redhat who offer software packages like samba that allow users to access and write to Windows file systems.
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As a big GNU/Linux fan, I’m always checking up on the latest open source projects. I found that a group of folks is developing a free ‘Windows’ OS (not an emulated Windows on Linux like Wine) that will allow folks to install and run software written for MS Windows in a free OS environment that looks and feels just like Windows.

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In 1999, I gave up on MS Windows entirely and actually purchased Redhat Linux. I went through a couple versions of the kernel, and learned alot about how to run the OS. It did pretty much everything Windows did, but never easily. I was searching for something more polished, and easier to use and I decided to go with the MAC iBook and OS X. I was so happy with it that I gave away my old desktop to the lady across the street leaving myself no PC to run linux on. Cathy has a Dell and I threw an extra hard drive in it, but OS X did everything I needed, so I never bothered to “borgify” it. Recently, a friend at work turned me on to the latest distro of Mandrake Linux (9.2) which he had downloaded and burned onto two CDs. Holy Cow. What a difference from Linux distros of old! I think we’re finally approaching a Linux that you could install for Grandma and not frighten her (too much).Cathy’s machine is a Dell Dimension 4100 (PIII 800) with an HP scanner and an HP deskjet (previously never worked with Linux). I was able to get both of these devices working with no problem. The cool thing is that now the printer is shared (using CUPS) and I can print from the iBook which I could NOT do before! I set up shares (using Samba) so the iBook and the Dell laptop can share files with the Dimension which has a huge hard drive. The only hiccup was the lousy winmodem in the Dell, but since we don’t use a modem now, I can wait to mess with that. The machine has now been turned into a real server too which is a big difference from when it was running Windows. Now its a web server (with mysql and php installed) so I can dump all our family photos there and point family and friends to our (minimally changing) IP address. I can get in via SSH and run a VNC client and control the desktop from work or the iBook. It has a full install of the Gimp (photoshop), Open Office which for all intents and purposes now is even better than MS Office. The Palm Pilot synced with no problem (had to set a sim link to /dev/pilot, but I could do that for Grandma).

All in all, I’m very impressed. I feel pretty confident that if you have an old PC and you want to set it up for Grandma WITHOUT buying Windows, you could do so using Linux now and she might not even be able to tell the difference. You could set her up so that you could access her desktop remotely to fix whatever issues crop up, and you could rest assured that it won’t crash on her when she’s trying to do something the wrong way. All around great distro!

You can download the latest ISO images (to burn onto a CD) of Mandrake here.

There are a bunch of screenshots on their features page.