I’ve become fed up trying to support my parents Windows machine, an AMD Athlon 2100+ with 512M of RAM, more than enough you would think for the fairly limited stuff they do on it.

The machine ran fine when I originally built it for them, Windows XP, SP1…. of course you eventually add/update things such as a virus scanner, .net framework, Windows Live Messenger/Hotmail, Service Pack 3 and eventually it feels like you’ve gone back to your 486.

Being a Linux man, i’ve been pondering simply nuking their machine and replacing it with Linux. But then you face the dilemma, which flavour? For the last few years i’ve mainly used Gentoo for anything that I put together, not really suitable as an OS for my parents though. Alot of people have raved at me about Ubuntu, so I eventually gave in and downloaded the Umbongo Ubuntu cd’s and fired them up in a test box.

To my surprise, I think my mum could have installed Ubuntu. A couple of pages of fairly simple questions, a 5 minute wait and a reboot later and I was looking at the Gnome branded Ubuntu desktop. Just a few minutes quicker than my last Gentoo install

Anyway, I know there’s lots of alternatives to various pieces of Windows software, so it’s Firefox instead of Internet Explorer, OpenOffice.org instead of Office, Pidgin instead of Windows Resource Hogging Messenger… I think they can handle that! But then what about various other things? Scanning, Printing, Zuma (some crazy addictive Windows game that my dad likes), Putting pictures onto a Digital Photo Frame, etc.

So I started with the scanning, I hate scanners in Windows, almost as much as I hate printers, put I pulled out my trusty scanner and plugged it into the test box. Twiddled thumbs, nothing bad seemed to happen which was a bonus. I looked in the list of applications and Ubuntu seems to come with Xsane installed by default. I’ve heard of but not yet tried ‘Gnome Scan’, but as XSane was installed it makes sense to at least give it a try. I started it up, it told me that it was searching for devices, it found one device and then presented me with about four crazy looking windows. Now it only took me a few moments to familiarise myself with them,within a minute or two i’d already previewed what I wanted to scan, cropped around the item in the preview window and then scanned the image into a viewer. I was pretty impressed, i’m just not sure that it would have been that easy for my Mum, perhaps with a little training. So I need to investigate other alternatives at some point, Gnome Scan being he top of the list I guess.

The next thing I looked into was running Zuma on Linux. I couldn’t find a ported Linux alternative, so I was forced down the route of trying Wine. I’d looked at it in the past for something and had limited success. But thought i’d give it a go, I had nothing to lose. I opened the add/remove programs, typed ‘wine’ in the search bar, selected the wine package for install and a few clicks later the package manager did its thing and I had Wine installed. I opened the Wine Config screen first to check that everything made sense, as I expected it did… There was a ‘virtual’ c_drive mapped to a directory within the users home directory, presumably where Wine puts installed program files etc. I downloaded the Zuma Deluxe demo from the Internet to the Desktop and double clicked the executable installer (wow I feel like a Windows user again ) . Needless to say, I was presented with the Zuma installer… A few clicks later (and a few error messages about not being able to create links to the manufacturers website), I had a Zuma Deluxe icon on the desktop. That was nice and easy. As things were going so well, it made sense to at least try playing Zuma for a bit, just to ensure that it was up to the standard that my dad would be expecting. I was mightily impressed, Zuma worked just as well (probably better) as it did on the Windows machine. That’s another item off the list.

I’m yet to try printing, USB attached storage, a few other Windows only applications, a sensible way to backup their system to one of mine and of course, rolling this out to my parents to try.

But so far, it’s umbongo++ from me.