As a follow-up to my previous entry, An Ubuntu Experiment, I wanted to keep you updated on how my neighbors are doing with their new Ubuntu workstation. I caught up with them yesterday to discuss how things are running.
The first report was that things are going great. They’ve got everything figured out and running, they even saw that it had a firewall, but, they asked, it has no antivirus! Do they need antivirus, they wanted to know.
I explained to them that there was antivirus protection programs available, but that right now, due to the nature of Linux, it really wasn’t necessary. I explained that they should be careful of running things with which they are unfamiliar, but that viruses were unlikely to be a problem. It took some convincing.
The mother was hooked on games. They were psyched to have new games besides Freecell and Solitaire, and she enjoyed the abundance of games on the default install.
They were unable to get their video camera to work. They told me the disk that came with it didn’t work. I explained that the driver and software was for Windows, and that the camera probably worked fine. “But,” I asked, “which program were you using it with?” Blank. “Well,” I continued, “what are you trying to do?” Blank. They hadn’t really considered why they needed or wanted the camera. It just was there. We’ll revisit that with them later.
Their internet experience was complete. They got Flash installed. They got MP3s working. They understood Firefox. They were also able to get their digital camera synced.
So far, the experiment is going very well.
Is it a digicam, camcorder or webcam? If it’s a digicam, it should work. If it’s a camcorder, it will work easily, with little work. If it’s a webcam, chances are that it won’t work out of the box, and if it will, there are no apps beyond Ekiga that use it, so it won’t be of practical usage for them.