| A Senior Citizens Introduction To Linux |
by Terry Hatfield
Terry Hatfield introduced Linux to a Senior Citizen in response to her ongoing Windows system woes. Hatfield proves that Linux can be used successfully by anyone wanting to perform simple tasks -- in this case browsing the Internet, using email, and playing solitaire. After a one month trial, Hatfield asked the elderly woman if she wanted Linux removed from her system, and she affirmed that her new OS of choice was Linux . . .
A Senior Citizens Introduction to Linux
by Terry Hatfield
Background
Several months ago I was introduced to an elderly lady in our small community that was having some difficulty with her computer. She had heard that I might be able to help and she needed someone who was close by if she ran into trouble. (I have been using computers since about 1984 and I enjoy trying to resolve various computer problems. I have built several of my own systems and have installed and used various computer OS's (DOS, OS/2 (long time user), Beos, Windows 95 (short time) and now Mandrake Linux (2 years+).)
She was using an HP 6740C, running Windows 98. She uses her computer for only three things; surfing the web (mainly news), getting her email (keeping in contact with her children), and playing solitaire.
My first instance of contact with her had to do with email. I would later find out that this was almost always her biggest problem. She had problems sending emails, and sometimes receiving them. She was using Outlook Express for email and Internet Explorer as her browser. As I began to work through this process of helping her over the weeks and months (I was there about once every two weeks), I found out that the settings were changed in the pop and smtp accounts. I could never pin her down about her changing these. She said she didn't, but how else would they have changed? I would correct the account and then come back in two weeks to do it again. During the course of these events she acquired a couple of virii, which I cleaned for her, and of course the usually complaint of the computer just locking up. How do you explain to an elderly lady that it was “normal” for this system to do that! She doesn't know that there are other systems out there.
She said she had heard of Netscape and had a disk set from her ISP, so I suggested we try that. It was 4.7. I thought of Mozilla, because by this time 1.0 had been out and I liked it on Linux. But I thought that it would be more confusing for her so I opted for what she knew. Netscape worked well for a little while, but IE and Outlook Express kept raising their ugly heads every so often. It finally got so that when she booted up Outlook Express would always start even before the desktop was fully loaded. I even spent some time on the Net trying to find out what was causing this initial start up. I could find nothing in the autoexec.bat or .ini files that would cause this. Things were getting worse not better. I thought that surely the computer should run longer than a week or two without having to fix something.
At this point I was getting frustrated. I don't mind helping and fixing, but to do it over and over again was getting to be a bit much. So I made a suggestion. “Would you like to try something else.” She agreed, but wanted to know what it was. I said that I “might” have a solution, but I couldn't guarantee anything. If what I had in mind didn't work, I would do a fresh reinstall of Windows 98.
I took her computer for two days.
The big question that was in my mind and the reason that I never made a solid commitment to anything was because this computer had, but what else, a winmodem and Internet access was vital for her.
The Process
So here I was with an HP computer and I have no idea what is inside this box. The very first thing I did was to try and see if Knoppix 3.1 would run on this machine. I had got a copy of this CD a couple of months before, just in case a situation like this ever came up. So away we went. Popped in the CD, rebooted and things started to go well. Everything was being seen, on board video and sound, except for the modem. As it started to load KDE I received a message saying not enough memory to run it. If I wanted to run another windows manager I could do that. I wanted KDE so I closed everything down and opened the case. I found two dimm slots, but only one slot being used with 64 megs of ram. I rummaged through my computer “stuff” and found another stick of 64 megs of ram and stuffed it in the slot. Booted with Knoppix again right up into KDE. Everything worked except for the modem.
Knowing that I had a very good chance of Linux running on this machine I proceeded to do a complete re-install of Windows 98. I partitioned off 2 gigs for Windows 98 and let the HP disks do their recover thing. All went well and soon I was connected to the Internet.
I knew that I would need to resolve the winmodem situation. I had read that there were some drivers that could possibly make a winmodem work under Linux, but before I did too much searching I wanted to make sure Linux could run on this machine.
I had acquired Lycoris (build 44) a few months previous and had loaded it on a test machine just to see what it was like. It looked good, but a little to basic for me so I stayed with Mandrake 8.1. I thought that Lycoris would be just the thing for this ladies machine so I installed it. It installed well, and picked up everything that was on the computer except for the modem. I was a little disappointed in this for this distribution is being advertised as one to make the transition from Windows to Linux easier (I realize that the later builds may have corrected this problem by now, no disrespect to Lycoris). So I booted into Windows 98 and got on the net and started looking for a driver that might fix the winmodem problem.
I located Linmodems.org and found it very helpful. What I needed to know was the chipset of the modem that was used. They provide a utility for finding this out. After running the utility I discovered that this modem had Conexant chipset. Linmodems.org had a link and it directed me to this site mbsi.ca/cnxtlindrv. Here I found several drivers. Two where in RPM format for Mandrake and Redhat and the other was .gz for other distros. I downloaded the .gz file and unpacked and installed it. When I booted up Lycoris it still did not see the modem. Upon reading some more install information it stated that the kernel might need to be recompiled to get this to work. I didn't want to spend the time to recompile so I decided I would install Mandrake 8.1 and get the RPM for the Mandrake winmodem. (In hindsight and in fairness to Lycoris, there was another RPM that I might have used that would have worked with Lycoris.)
The Mandrake install went without incident. Again, all device were seen and put into place upon reboot except for the winmodem. I had setup KPPP, but it would not recognize that a modem was there. I pulled the Mandrake modem RPM from the windows partition where I had downloaded it previously and proceeded to install it. I logged out and back into KDE and opened up KPPP, went to setup and queried the modem and there it was. I was half way home. I now tried to connect to the Internet and what do I hear but the sweet sound of a modem trying to dial. I waited, sort of holding my breath hoping that the familiar sounds would continue indicating a complete connection and I received what I had hoped for. A connection to the Internet with Linux using a winmodem!
I had been using Mozilla 1.1 since it had been released and I felt that this was the best browser for now. It was the one I was most familiar with and because I would be maintaining this system I chose to install it. Again no problem with the install. I set up the email account with no problem and then began to test the system. I logged onto the Internet did some browsing and sent and received some email. All seemed to go will. I did this several times because I wanted to make sure that the modem dialed up each and every time I logged onto the Internet. I did not want to find out that it worked only 4 out of 5 tries. It worked every time. Thanks to Marc Boucher and the people at mbsi.ca/cnxtlindrv for the great work.
The last order of business was to get her a solitaire game on the desktop. I searched through the menus and found Pysol. I started it up and it had way more than one card game. I couldn't believe it had so many. I made sure that Klondike solitaire was the default choice and put an icon on the desktop for her.
I then began to “dumb down” the desktop and menu system. As I stated at the beginning she only needed to do three things; browse the Internet, get email and play solitaire. I took all the icons off the desktop except for Mozilla, Pysol, Cdrom, Floppy and Konquerer's file management (this eventually went too). I went through the default Mandrake menu list and removed many of the items that I thought would be confusing to a new user. I left things like games, and Kword because those might be useful later on. I wanted to make the choices as simple and as easy as possible. So here I was with a computer set up to dual boot into Windows 98 or Mandrake Linux 8.1. I felt that I had done all I could do to make the transition to Linux as easy as possible for this new user. I was now ready to see how all of this would unfold.
Training and Administration
(I try to describe here, as simply as possible, what the initial problem was and how I tried to resolve it.)
First Event
I took here computer back to her place and set everything up again. I would spend a little time explaining to her how this system worked. But before I did that here is what I said. “You have to try this system for one month. You cannot at anytime boot into Windows 98. If after the one month period you do not like what you are using I will take all of it off and you can go back to your old system.” She agreed to that.
I had set up Mandrake to log in automatically. Again this was a choice that I made to make it as easy as possible to use and because she was the only user I felt that there was no point in making her stop and log in. I never allowed here to have root privileges as I will be the one to maintain this for her. I did explain to her later a little about this but not to any great extent (mainly if she encountered a dialog box that was asking for a password, she was into something that she wasn't suppose to be and to cancel it out).
I then walked her through the system from turning on the computer to getting to her applications. Once she turned on the computer she was to just ignore all the stuff coming up on the screen and wait for the desktop to come up. I showed her how to logout and shut the system down. We went through this 3 or 4 time so that she could see what it looked like and to understand what was happening.
I showed her how to log onto and logoff the Internet. I took her through Mozilla and how to access her email. Some of this was familiar because of using other browsers, but she just had to get used to the Mozilla way of doing things. It was then on to Pysol and here game of solitaire. About two hours later I left her with a fairly straight forward newbie Linux system.
I now waited for the first phone call.
Second Event (Day 4)
I received a call wondering what KPPP was and that some other small screen had come up over the top of this. I wasn't able to identify over the phone what that was. She also had a problem of trying to send an email from Mozilla.
Third Event (day 6)
Went over to find out what her concerns were with KPPP and her email. I discovered that when she opened the Internet icon the dialog box came up for her to connect. It of course was the KPPP dialog box. Because it didn't say Internet on it she was confused. Finally she clicked the connect button which began the login process and this brought up another dialog box giving information to connection status. This dialog box has “log” and “close” button. It was this “log” button that she was pushing which opened up the log window that was causing her concern. She didn't realize that she was still being connected to the Internet. I believe she was pushing the close button because something was happening that she didn't understand and consequently canceling the login process to the Internet. I walked her through the process again, telling her what to do, so I will see what happens now.
The problem with Mozilla was that when it started the profile box came up. She had created two other profiles besides the original. This seemed to cause multiply instances of smtp in the email client. I deleted the two profiles and redid the email account setup and it now seems to work. Again, I instructed her what to do and not do.
Fourth Event (Day 12)
Received an email saying that she didn't know how to get off the Internet.
I went over to see what the problem was. She was logging off okay, but the KPPP login dialog box pops up when you log off and of course you need to choose “quit” to shut it down. This was confusing to here. She was associating logging off the Internet with shutting down the whole system (logout from the big K). I wrote some basic instructions for her; how to shutdown, how to log onto the Internet, how to log off the Internet, and how to start Mozilla. She really didn't need the log on instructions or the starting Mozilla. I watched her and these two things went well for her.
She says that her emails having been coming and going with no problems. She was pleased with this.
As I was looking at her desktop, I discovered two icons had been added to the KDE panel bar. A desktop icon and a folder. She didn't known where they came from. I had left a Konquerer icon on the desktop for file management. She had most likely opened up Konquerer and had dragged two icons onto the startup bar unknowingly (I figure). I took the Konquerer icon off the desktop. I will watch for any other icons the next time I go over. (I now believe she did drag these icons from the menus.)
Fifth Event (Day 20)
A problem came up with Mozilla when trying to add an address to the address book. When entering data into the dialog box, nothing could be saved due to the dialog box being to too large for screen. The OK and Apply buttons could not be accessed. Doing a little searching on the Internet gave me a clue. By holding down the alt key and moving the mouse one is able to move the box up to access the buttons at the bottom.
Sixth Event (Day 32)
I received a call saying that she was having another problem. I went over to see what the issue was. The Mozilla profile manager had come up (again) and she had made another “default” profile. This of course caused problems with her bookmarks and her email accounts. This would not be an issue if she just accepted the default and went on. What is happening here is that for some reason, the profiler comes up on occasion, when Mozilla is opened. When this happens and another “default” is added it causes some confusion and as a result things get mixed up and don't work. I went into the .mozilla directory in her “home” directory and found about five instances of “default” profiles. I scanned them all and found the one that was hers and deleted the rest. After logging out and back in to KDE both bookmarks and email worked fine. I haven't found out why this profile manager comes up occasionally and if there is anyway of preventing it to be activated, especially on a single user machine. If this can be solved it would be one less thing to throw a curve at the new user.
Concluding Thoughts
The test month has ended. I asked her if she wanted me to remove the system and go back to the other system she was using? “No”, she said, “I like this one.” (I think we have a convert!)
It has been an interesting month and a very interesting experiment, although she didn't know that she was the experiment. The conclusion; that anyone can use Linux.
That being said, here are a few of my thoughts on what unfolded.
I believe that with many people it doesn't matter what operating system they use as long as it gets the job done. I could have put on OS/2, Beos, or something else and as long as she was able to surf the web, get email and play solitaire she would have been happy. The issue is that it has to be stable and it has to not change things arbitrarily. These are the two issues that cause so many problems with Windows 9x. (I don't know about XP, because I have never used it.) If these could be solved then I am sure that she would have been happy with her original system. But as far as I am concerned, lock ups once or twice a day are not acceptable. What I choose and how I set up my system should just be that with no interference with some other program “thinking” it knows what I want.
Another issue that is purely human related and concerns mostly the elderly, is memory. As people get older they have a tendency to forget things. I believe that this is half of the battle when instructing people on something new. They forget what they did the last time. It invariably causes them some problems in just the overall operation of a computer. When I wrote down specific instructions on a piece of paper that she had easy access to, it seemed to help.
There were a couple of issues that where not OS related that caused her problems. The first was the Mozilla address book dialog box being too large for the screen. She was running 640 x 480 resolution (because of eye sight). As I began testing other dialog boxes I discovered that this is something that is inherent to KDE. I tried several other dialog boxes and they did the same thing. I even tried this on my computer and it's resolution is 1024 x 768. Same thing, although not as bad. This is a problem that needs to be resolved for things to function more smoothly on the desktop.
The second is specific to Mozilla and that is the profile manager. It should not come up occasionally. It should be on or off. Now I may have overlooked something with this and if I have please inform me. But if not, then for the single user a choice of having a profile manager should be given. This is not a big issue for me or most people, but remember what I said early about memory. If you forget what has happened before then this can end up being confusing.
So will the calls keep coming? I think so. Will they be less? I believe so. When I set her up with Mandrake Linux I knew that I would have to maintain her system to some degree. I was doing that anyhow with the Windows system. Why not do it with something that has the stability to go along with it and with something that I am sure down the road will require less and less hand holding.
I am confident that Linux will do the simple things that she requires and with a lot less hassles. The ability to configure a system anyway I like it is extremely important. We can make Linux for the power user and as simple as need be for senior citizen to use.
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