Progress on Mom's Ubuntu Workstation

I've replaced the hard drive, added an old NIC card, and added an additional memory SIMM to take us to 256MB. I downloaded, checked the MD5, and burned an ISO image of Ubuntu 6.10. Finally, I booted the workstation into Ubuntu and started the install off the CD.

Right now, my biggest headache is the need to commandeer the family (and my wife's business) KVM to work on Mom's workstation (she's out of town and I didn't want to bother her with bringing all the wires and a giant monitor...). So, I'll work when the wife is out or sleeping...best time to get stuff done anyway!

I'm starting to consider training for Mom. Primarily, it will be us sitting down and walking through the most common tasks. These look like good books but perhaps even a bit to much for Mom (maybe better for me!).

Ubuntu Linux for Non-Geeks
Ubuntu Linux For Dummies

Beginning Ubuntu Linux

Any advice out there? I'm not finding much on Google...

Comments

Rollback a Ooops in TFS with TFPT Rollback

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Switching the Parents to Ubuntu...?

I spent a half hour or so recently on the phone walking my Mom through a technical issue. Tentatively, I diagnosed her issue as a hard drive failure. She brought it over on her last visit and sure enough, the Dell XPS 450 from circa 1999 sounds like a bad coin-operated laundry at full capacity. I was aghast to discover she's running Windows 98. Ugh. Also, her recovery disk is just that--for recovery. I don't believe I'll be able to re-install Win98 on a new hard drive. That, coupled with the end of Microsoft (and Dell) support for Win98, got me thinking about Linux. (and she's not intense about her computing needs...and she doesn't want to spend much money...) I've been reading good things about switching one's parents to Ubuntu. Any thoughts out there?

VSTS Tester Demo Follow-ups

Last week, I delivered a VSTS 2008 Tester Edition demo to a prospective client. Following up on a few questions to which I didn’t know the answer: Q. Can I use Subversion with TFS? A. I get this question all the time from developers. It’s a perfectly valid question. The answer is no…but yes…sort of. The version control repository (and all data) must remain SQL Server. Yes, it’s proprietary. Further, if you plan to use TFS in your software development environment, but choose not to leverage it for version control, it severely limits the usefulness of the information elicited from TFS (because you’re not feeding in the crucial VC data). If you’re not leveraging VC in TFS, you’re probably not leveraging Team Build either. That said, while a fully-integrated TFS for ALM and SCM is the ideal, there’s a compelling argument to leverage TFS as a repository for requirements, scenarios, test cases, functional and load testing as well as defect tracking. TFS is an excellent repository to s...

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