Debian Squeeze for My Parents - Strategy - Pt1

v 0.2

My Parents are getting on in years, and with me living on the other side of the country to them, I don't get to visit perhaps as often as we all think we should.  So, since I had a couple of weeks free recently, I jumped on an aircraft and paid a visit for a week.

One of the items on my "list of things to do" was to see what I could do to improve their computing experience - particularly in the areas of security and to make their use of the machine as a communication device a more pleasant experience.  What I would have liked to have done is to just buy them an iMac, however I knew they would have regarded that as an extravagance and would have resisted because it was "different".  My Brother-in-law had been helping them as he could, however he was "time-poor" and couldn't devote all the time that was probably needed to teach them what they needed to know, and I certainly didn't want to get in his way since he was there and I wasn't.

I remember the desktop as being an early Pentium 4 machine with not much memory, and I'd been told that there had been a bit more memory put in, so I thought I'd just take stock of what was there.  When I fired the machine up, my first thought was .. this is rather snappy!  It was a newer machine than I'd remembered and quite nice for what it was:

• 15inch LCD Screen
• Pentium 4 3.2 gig
• 1 gig memory
• DVD RW
• FDD
• 80 gig HDD
• Windows XP Home

Internet access was using Internet Explorer through a router, and I found that the virus protection hadn't been updated in a few months.  For me, the only good thing here was that the machine was behind a router.  My personal, biased opinion is that you have to be nuts to use IE on a regular basis, however on a more rational level, Windows XP is rapidly becoming outdated, is inherently less secure than current systems, and can not run the latest Internet Explorer browser.  Outdated virus protection certainly didn't help.

Aha! I thought, there may be a zero-cost way to improve things here.  Importantly though, in installing a new system on the machine, it is important that Windows still boots up by default.  Forcing them into this "new fangled system" just gets the ire up and works against what you want to achieve.

After thinking about it all, I decided to use the last 30 gig of the HDD for Debian, and setting it up so that the system defaulted to Windows.

Next, the installation.


Later ..........