Hi Yall & Eward,
who wrote at some length below.
The most friendly Debian I've tried, given the generation of hardware you are talking about, is Xandros Tux 1.0.
It auto-detected & loaded the nVida drivers, when I ran there kit.
If your friend can hold off a month or two, a newer version of Xandros is due out.
Oh, since your in NZ, you can get Xandros from these guys...
http://www.hotchips.co.nz/
No, I do not own shares in them....
*HTH*
*BTN*
Greek Geek :-)
Edward Murrell wrote:
Hi there,
A friend of mine has had Windows installed for over a year. He's getting somewhat sick of it due to the recent spate of virus and spyware that's rendered his machine unusable. He's asked me to reinstall Windows, and Linux in a dual boot configuration.
The problem is this; while I've been running Debian on the desktop for over two years, a large proportion of the average Joe desktop stuff has never graced my machine. I've never seriously looked at any hotplug, automounting, gui configuration tools, hardware auto-detection, or any of the other little things that make an OS 'easy' for non-tech people.
I'm hoping for a list of applications and software that people have come across which has worked (properly) every time. I am doing my own research, but I'm hoping other people may know something that I don't find.
I'm aiming at a GNOME desktop, but am perfectly happy to recommend KDE if the applications support is better.
* Things that I'm seeking information on specifically;
* Automount of CD's for KDE. (Gnome has magicdev)
* Automount / appear on desktop, of USB / firewire devices.
* Video editing/collection applications. The guy has a Sony digital cam, and likes to rip and edit movies. Connects via USB and/or firewire.
* Versions of GNOME 2.x, and KDE 3.x that are stable - and that goes for the bundled applications as well. I like the bleeding edge, but the average user is not so forgiving.
* Automagical detection of hardware.
* Something to handle screen resolution changes.
* DHCP for the network, overridable by the ppp (dial-up modem) connection that doesn't hold up the system if no DHCP server is available.
* An apt-get shell that lists applications, rather than packages (this probably doesn't exist).
* Basic image editing software (preferably not something as complicated as the GIMP).
* Those apps and libs you don't notice until you discover you forgot to install them - like gnome-spell.
* Anything anyone else can think of.
The hardware is as follows; Athlon 1600, 256 MB DDR, nForce1 board, nForce1 sound, AGP GF4MX, generic networking (Realtek I think).
Cheers Edward Murrell
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