Completing the conversion

I had to spend most of Saturday morning rounding up some final ancillary parts (keyboard, wireless, bluetooth) for my parents PC, and by lunch time I was itching to get this thing done. I rocked up with their new PC with Ubuntu pre-installed and they were both quite impressed.

I think they have plans for it to be their personal entertainment centre in their study, as the TVs in their house are always occupied.

It took some explaining to them about the concept of free/open-source software, and how to use Ubuntu in general. It was most likely over my Dad’s head, but I think Mum was getting some of it. He’s more than happy, he can watch his music DVDs, listen to his songs, and browse the web. I think that’s where it ends for him at the moment. He did however like GNUbik being a Rubik’s Cube nut.

Setting up Evolution was annoying with his Yahoo! mail account. Yahoo! don’t offer POP forwarding unless you have a premium account . I was quite keen on him using Evolution as it has the in-built tasks, vFolders and the claimed ability to sync with a mobile phone over bluetooth (I haven’t found any good sources on how to do this). In the end I opted for Thunderbird and the WebMail extension.

I accidentally forgot to install their HP printer, and got an email on Monday; they were inserting the Windows drivers CD but it wouldn’t start. Whoops! I was able to walk them through it over the phone, which was a thankfully painless exercise. Their bluetooth is also causing some problems, however my adapter works fine, so I’ll have to see about swapping them at some point.

I did however get one interesting query from Mum, which I’d never really thought about before. Ubuntu (and derivatives) recognise when a USB/memory card is inserted, and you can simply open the media and browse the contents using whatever file manager. When you are done you can just yank it out. Yet, there is still the option, to mount and then unmount the device. She mainly asked this of me because in Windows XP, you generally click that little green arrow in the system tray to ’safely remove’ the device.

So what’s the standard? Just plug in the USB and open to get to your files? Or mount and the unmount the USB?

My first XP BSOD

I just came in to work this morning and I had the Blue Screen of Death across both monitors, it was very cool!

I actually have never seen a BSOD on XP before. Interesting.

I was going to say at least it’s not coming back, but it is coming back … all the time.

Here’s the gist of it …

DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

blah blah blah

STOP: 0×000000D1 (0×00000023, 0×00000002, 0×00000000, 0xB78531B6)
NVTcp.sys – Address B78531B6 base at B784F000, Datestamp 4253b85b

etc etc etc

Turns out from a simple google search for nvtcp.sys that the culprit it the NVIDIA network manager; apparently it tries to share an IRQ address, which causes the issue? Over my head.

So I’m uninstalling that quick smart, I wan’t my dual screen setup back …

It seems that everything is fine now.

Step two of the conversion to Ubuntu

I bought and assembled my parent’s new PC yesterday. I got them a 19in widescreen LCD, which looks gorgeous. I want one!

This was the first time I’ve installed Ubuntu onto a completely fresh machine, no Windows here. Almost flawless setup, except for my bungling of the partitions, and it took next to no time.

Downloading updates over ADSL was not so quick.

Now all I need to do is identify and install any packages that they may need. First important thing is to setup the ability to browse a Windows network, as that is how they will be getting their old data off their old PC. I’ve never done that before, so I will need to work on that. SAMBA I guess??

The only other thing I need to consider is their printer, a problem which I have never had, seeing as I almost never print things out (only PDF printing).

I’ve already installed all the necessary codecs and things to play .mp3’s, .avi’s and DVD’s. Other than that Ubuntu seemed pretty complete for applications. I don’t want to install too much, so I can give my parents a demo of how Synaptic works.

I also think I’ll install some different window managers to give my parents the choice. With the release of XFCE 4.4.0, I think I’ll install xfwm at least (love that native transparency).

I recently went through some RSS feeds checking out some new Beryl features, which look rad. I think my dad was quite interested in Beryl, so I might include that too.

And I also am thinking of putting Metisse on there as well. I’m hoping to give the Mandriva 2007 One Live CD a go today.

Hopefully I’ll have everything just working by the time I take it over, for a seamless transition from Windows to Ubuntu.