[Scottish] Linux distro for mum?

[Colin McKinnon]

On Wednesday 03 November 2004 16:13, M. Hasan Vazir wrote:
> I have installed Ubuntu, painless install and very fast, but gnome only.
> On the web, visiting web sites with java, flash and streaming
> audio/video will need some configuration. I haven't been able to sort
> some of it.
> Suse on the other hand is pretty good and would recommend it. If all
> else fails, install Knoppix, brilliant.
>

Oddly enough I'm about to deliver a Linux box to *my* mother (we'll need to 
start a mother's faction in Scotlug ;). And decided I'd put a Knoppix install 
on it. I'd previously used RedHat and SuSE mostly but been impressed by the 
performance of Knoppix (running from HD that is). So it got installed and 
upgraded to a more complete debian type system onlne.

The downside is that (IMHO) it's not as polished as SuSE, (e.g. their 
spamassasin rpm comes pretrained - but the debian package doesn't appear to 
be) and sometimes you have to go round the houses a little to do relatively 
simple things. Their 2.6 rollout is a bit more advanced than SuSE's although 
a lot of application default configs ignore ipv6 (like sshd).

IIRC Ubuntu provides a coherent admin frontend - next time around I'd be 
tempted to try that.

> > I'm looking for the least hassle distro as mum will be
> > 100 miles away. I'm thinking perhaps Fedora Core or
> > Umbuntu if it's mature enough.
> >

If she's got an internet connection then the distance doesn't matter (I've 
recently started playing with FreeNX - very good, even over a dial-up).

> > Also any thoughts on hardware (laptop vs pc vs
> > self-assemble) would be welcome.
> >

If its an option I'd say go for the laptop. It's less wires to plug in, and it 
tidies out of the way easily. You don't get as mush bang for your buck - but 
you get portability and a UPS too!

HTH

C.