My mother just told me she found out why her 90 year old friend stopped emailing.
She can’t find anyone to help her with the PC her (out of state) son set up for her. All the PC repair places she has called will only come help on Windows or Mac OS. Same with her friends and neighbors.
She is however, safe from virus infections and malware :rolleyes:
It sucks that her son is dropping the ball on the tech support side of things, but I did exactly the same thing for my mom – bought her a cheap laptop, stuck Ubuntu on it, and set it up to automatically load up Firefox with her Gmail at startup. Since all she wants to do is email and basic web surfing, it’s pretty much foolproof. I’ve set the permissions so that she literally can’t break it – the worst that happens is she has to reboot and everything is back to normal.
Given the viruses and malware I’m constantly cleaning off my dad’s Windows computer (who refuses to stop clicking on random spam links and downloading dubious toolbars and applications), the Ubuntu has been an unqualified success for keeping a computer-illiterate parent online and out of trouble.
Have her call to the local college’s computer studies department. Some student there is bound to be up on it.
As Linux builds go, Ubuntu is pretty user-friendly; it was my first foray into Linux, and I used it until my laptop got too decrepit to use. I now use a Mac, so you can tell how much of a power user I am 
Why isn’t the son contactable in this scenario?
I ubunted YOUR 90-year-old mother last night.
(Couldn’t resist.)
This is pretty much what i was going to say.
If you just need a computer for the basics, Ubuntu is perfectly fine for a computer novice. Email, internet, basic word processing, etc. all work straight out of the box, with no problem whatsoever.
Even more complicated things are pretty damn easy to sort out. One of the non-standard things that a novice user might need is the ability to play DVDs and various restricted video and audio formats, but installing the software required for this is easy, and is something i could easily talk my mother through over the phone if she needed to do it.
This is also what I did with my brother who is a complete non-computer person. I bought a cheap Dell laptop, put Ubuntu on it, loaded Firefox and set it up for wireless access and left him to it with instructions to simply toss the thing if it started to have issues (I paid about $40 for the laptop).
-XT
For REALS?!? Please to share how you accomplished this feat?
Funny story.
I am writing this on a shitty netbook that until last week was running Vista. I got fed up with my windows install and decided to try Ubuntu.
The Ubuntu install was easier than any Windows install I’ve ever done (I think it asked me one question during install) and everything ‘just works’. I was and am quite impressed with this OS.
Must be an epidemic. I’m not 90, but a couple of years ago, my son also installed Ubuntu on my computer. I hated it- it was so stark and utilitarian. It was awful, especially because he also uninstalled all of the Microsoft Office and now I have to use OpenOffice which can be a real pain in the ass. I wish he’d never even thought about giving me Ubuntu.
Probably on craigslist, although I don’t think I’ve ever seen a working laptop with a wireless card that went that cheap.
FWIW, they’ve really dialed up the snazzy desktop effects and the like in the last few years, which some people like and gives others hissy fits.
But yea, I did this for my mother and law, and its seemed much more foolproof then her Windows machine ever did, though you have to put a certain amount of effort into locking everything down and putting the lauchers for everything she might need in easy to find locals.
Plus you can ssh in to fix problems remotely (granted I’m sure you can do this for Windows to, but I don’t know how why I do know how to use ssh).
I decided to install Linux Mint on my mother in law’s computer after she fried her installation of Windows because of Viruses. I had Microsoft Security Essentials running her version of XP and she still managed to have 500 viruses on it when I cleaned it out before. She later managed to fry it. I would have had to either reinstall Windows or something else, so I went ahead and set up Mint. I haven’t had to go there to fix anything since then. I did have complaints that she couldn’t open attachments that Russian folk she didn’t know were sending her, but what can you do.?
We installed Firefox, Open Office, and Skype for her so she is happy.
We did Ubuntu for my mother (in her 60s) on old laptops. For a few years it worked great. The only reason we switched was my Dad decided my mother needed a new computer and bought one with Windows 7.
Gmail, GDocs and YouTube - that’s pretty much what my mother does.
This. The thing I’ve always loved about Ubuntu (or any full-fledged Linux desktop distro, really) is that fresh installs are just so amazingly painless. Heck, you even end up with OpenOffice pre-installed.
Which part? I bought the Dell (Latitude D800 IIRC) from company surplus (no OS on it) and, um, well downloaded Ubuntu for free, burned it to CD and then installed it. It really wasn’t anything difficult or out of the ordinary afaik.
-XT
The part about buying a laptop for $40, which was the part quoted.
As I said, that was pretty easy. You could probably buy an old used laptop with no OS on it from a lot of places for that price. Our company actually sold several pallets of them (after giving us an opportunity to buy them first) for scrap, since most people didn’t really want the things.
-XT
I set my mother (70) up with a Ubuntu laptop.
Chromium for web browsing and Empathy for chat. If she plugs her camera in, Shotwell starts up. Easy-peasy.
This is a much better experience for her - what she needs to work works, and she doesn’t accidentally install all sorts of nonsense when she’s just trying to read e-mail. “Well, Germane’s e-mail had a big flashy thing to get “smilies” so I clicked it. I thought I needed to in order to see page two of the e-mail.”
Ubuntu is a great fit for these sorts of users.
But it sounds like the son in question hasn’t locked down his mother’s Ubuntu with easy-launch options, if she can’t get it to work by a simple reboot.
That’s the dick move, I think. If you’re going to do it, do it well. Lock down the bits that can be broken, set it to auto-launch a browser and email platform, and let Dear Mom go. If you’re going to do anything else, you better have your ass there to fix it for her.