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Re: [LUG] XP to Debian ...

 

On 22/05/11 10:45, Gordon Henderson wrote:
> 
> Her response was that it was a *lot* faster than XP! However, what she
> really meant wasn't that it was faster overall, but that she could run
> more applications at the same time and switch between them - something
> that seems extremely "clunky" under XP.

Funny because I think Desktop scheduling is still suspect, that said I
can quite believe XP does it worse, especially if memory is short.

Also XP has painful start-up times which degrades quickly as the
registry fragments, easy to fix, but I like the way chkdsk says "one of
the files you need to start your computer has been saved in 500
fragments, there is no need to defrag this drive".

> It wasn't all easy though - I installed FireFox4 and FlashPlayer - and
> for this, I had to delve into command-line territory. I also installed
> Thunderbird - although I did install that without the command-line, but
> using the file-manager thing to un-pack the tar.gz, then create a
> launcher to start it. However, I would not expect a non-geek to be able
> to do this, and a .deb package for FireFox, flash and thunderbird would
> have been nice (although to be fair, I didn't actually look for one,
> just used the download links on the mozilla.org website)

Non-geek would be wise to stick with the icedove and iceweasel bundled
which they can get without the command line, and will set its own
launchers and file mapping in GNOME (and KDE and probably other desktops).

Flash is a pain but there is a package to install an installer/updater
in one of the repositories.

> (I'm almost tempted to simply mount her
> home directory via NFS though - however we only have 100Mb networking
> here and that might slow things down a bit)

Some of the apps like urm Firefox have started using small SQL databases
and the like which makes having a home directory on a network mount more
painful than one would want. If it can be avoided stick with
synchronising it for backup.

> It might have been harder had she been using Outlook or some other Email
> system, however at least she's been using IMAP for ever.

Mozilla importers for their Windows versions will move it across to a
form that is easily exported to GNU/Linux, it is an extra step...

> I didn't like the standard Gnome idea of using 2 "bars" for stuff - we
> started by moving the bottom one to the right and the top one to the
> bottom, but really want to lose one of them completely, so some
> adjusting will be needed there. Although her monitor is 4:3, I think
> that in these days of wide, short screens, we need all the vertical
> space we can get!

I just have them auto-hide. Kind of got use to having both of them.

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