[Sussex] Linux for simplicity

[John Crowhurst]

> As some of you may know, when I'm not at college, I'm
> repairing/upgrading/troubleshooting computers.  It's mainly the latter
> these days, and a large chunk of my customers are elderly and have zero
> computer knowledge whatsoever.  All a lot of them want is a simple way
> to send/receive email, word process and browse the internet.....

What sort of look and feel in the window manager would you be after for
this? If you moved away from Gnome and KDE, you could make a more
lightweight distribution for them.

Have a look here for a nice window manager:
http://www.xwinman.org/

> For a while I've been thinking about somehow implementing linux with a
> minimalist Window manager and just 3 menu options (Email, Web, Office).
> In an ideal world I could spend hours compiling Gentoo from source and
> configuring the hardware but that's just not practical (I don't charge
> by the hour - hehe).  I've been racking my brains trying to come up with
> a simple way to get linux onto the machine and configured to work with
> their hardware in a short enough space of time to make it worthwhile.
> I'd welcome any suggestions on this.

I think the biggest problem would be graphics cards and monitor sizes,
you'd have to build a set of XF86Config's for each combination, and
perhaps put together a simple menu driven setup program so that you choose
the monitor size, graphics card, window manager, etc, and it gets the
appropriate config files from a central server.

> My second idea was to sell brand new linux systems a-la Evesham.  I
> regularly sell a pretty basic system with parts from eBuyer as a cheap
> upgrade option, without an OS.  It would be simple enough to do an linux
> install/config then keep an image to copy over to each new machine using
> the same hardware.  We're only talking one machine a week here but every
> little helps.

You could put the basic system files on a CD, boot the CD to configure the
network, have it grab the necessary files from an FTP/NFS server on your
network, install and configure them to what you need, and they are done.
You may like to have a network card that you put in the box you are
building, so you can remove it once the machine is built to spec.

> The aim of this is to give customers exactly what they want, a simple to
> use, stable system that does what they want - no more, no less at
> minimal cost (i.e. free).  Windows cannot offer this, linux can, it's
> just a question of implementation.

It should be relatively easy to put some kind of configuration script
together for something like ncurses in perl or shell.

> The question is - am I mad or could this really work?  Any input
> welcome.

This could work really well, but you will need to sit down and plan out
how you want it to work, implement it and see what the customer thinks of
their new computer.

-- 
John