I blogged before about putting Linux on Jen’s laptop. After wring that post, I found that the new KDE (4.1 at the time, I think), didn’t really work out, so I simply slapped Ubuntu on there and asked her not to ignore the updates. That’s pretty much all I did, because she’s sick and tired of hearing me claim that Linux is far superior to any other OS 😉
In any case, she didn’t use it much, and kept booting into Windows by default. Fine by me, but every time she had a problem (wireless simply doesn’t work, SN connection problems, weird Firefox scrolling behaviour), I asked “well, does it work in Linux?”, because if it did, that would be my solution.
Then a couple of things happened. First, she wanted to edit some photographs, didn’t find a good application on her Windows partition for that, booted into Linux, found the Gimp, and liked it. Secondly, she bought a camera and didn’t liike the software that came with it. I installed Kino for her, and although converting movies into MPEG doesn’t always work the first time, it does get the job done eventually. With Emesene being an acceptable replacement for Messenger (apart from the games) she doesn’t have much reason anymore to boot into Windows.
However, her using a video editor meant that the 5GB partition I had put Ubuntu on wasn’t big enough anymore. I borrowed her laptop for a couple of hours, made the partition 10 GB, and installed Arch on it. I chose Arch instead of Ubuntu mainly because I wanted more recent software on it, like Firefox 3.5.
I wanted to keep the system lightweight, so I tried LXDE first, but that turned out to be a bit too sparse. XFCE turned out to be the better choice. I installed the Buuf icons because she liked them on my netbook, chose a purple theme she liked (which I think clashes horribly with the icons, but who am I 😉 ), made the Volume up, Volume down and Sleep buttons work, and gave it back.
She’s been booting into Linux by default now, because at the moment it’s that or a crippled Windows. The best thing about it is that I haven’t forced her to pick Arch. She made the choice herself.
The best thing for me is that I have to do the support of her laptop anyway, and I’m much better at it in Linux. Everybody happy.
San
Celettu's Weblog 
[…] The slow route to Linux « Celettu's Weblog […]
[…] The slow route to Linux She’s been booting into Linux by default now, because at the moment it’s that or a crippled Windows. The best thing about it is that I haven’t forced her to pick Arch. She made the choice herself. […]
Here you go Cletus, maybe your girlfriend can update now ;). Hope this prints out ok 😐
#!/bin/sh
# ~/.bin/Arch/pm – shorthand frontend to pacman management tasks
if [[ -z $@ ]]; then
echo "pm <option> <*package> – pacman management tasks:
1 | oneshot – adds package as a dependency
c | clean – removes package tarballs no longer installed
d | depclean – remove dependencies no longer used
f | forcerem – force removes package w/o dependencies
i | install – install a package
l | list – list files installed by the package
o | owns – lists package that owns the file
n | info – details about the package
q | query – search for an installed package
r | remove – remove a package
s | search – search for a package
u | upgrade – sync database and upgrade system
y | sync – sync database
mp – makepkg and install deps
mps – makepkg source for AUR"
exit
fi
case $1 in
1 | oneshot ) shift
yaourt -S –asdeps "$@"
;;
c | clean ) #pacman -Sc
pacclean
;;
d | depclean ) yaourt -Qtdq
;;
f | forcerem ) shift
pacman -Rcsd "$@"
;;
i | ins | install ) shift
yaourt -S "$@"
;;
l | ls | list ) shift
pacman -Ql "$@"
;;
o | own ) shift
for arg in "$@"; do
pacman -Qo `which $arg 2> /dev/null || echo $arg`
done
;;
n | info ) shift
for arg in "$@"; do
# pacman -Qi $arg 2> /dev/null || pacman -Si $arg
yaourt -Si $arg
done
;;
q | query ) shift
yaourt -Qs "$@"
;;
r | rm | remove ) shift
pacman -Rcs "$@"
;;
s | search ) shift
yaourt -Ss "$@"
;;
u | upg | upgrade ) yaourt -Syu –aur
;;
y | sync ) shift
yaourt -Sy
;;
mp ) makepkg -sf
;;
mps ) if [ ! -f ./PKGBUILD ]; then
echo No PKGBUILD in `pwd`
exit 1; else
sed -i "/^.*'[a-z0-9]\{32\}'.*$/d" PKGBUILD
makepkg -g >> PKGBUILD
makepkg -f –source
fi
;;
* ) yaourt "$@"
esac
Bah, formatting. Ok, here be better:
http://pastebin.com/m75c006b1