A couple weeks ago, my Dad’s home computer had a familiar problem.
Every once in a while, his computer — which runs Windows 2000 —
would not boot. It would go a few seconds through the boot process and then
stop with a blue screen and a message about the boot device not working.
This annoying problem has always been solved by booting off the Windows
2000 install CD, going to the Repair console, typing chkdsk /p,
and rebooting. Works every time... or did.
This time, after going through that process, his computer went into a
reboot loop, getting to a point in the boot process and then starting over
with the computer POST.
I had told my dad before the next time I had to reinstall the operating
system on his computer, it would not be Windows I’d be putting on it,
unless he wanted to shell out the $100 or so for Windows XP.
Knowing how frugal my dad is, I knew that wasn’t going to happen.
So, it was time to migrate my Dad’s home computer to Linux. Fedora
7, to be exact. I already moved his office computer to Linux a couple years
ago and he’s been fairly successful at getting work done on it. Part
of the reason for that is that he really only does a few things on his
computers:
- Composes documents (OpenOffice)
- Reads e-mail (Mozilla Thunderbird)
- Browses web pages (Mozilla Firefox)
- Plays Freecell... a lot (kpat)
On his home computer, he also does a few more things:
- Scans of photos and documents
- Downloads digital photos from his camera
- Prints digital photos
- Genealogy
Another problem I had to deal with is, running Windows, he’s been
using WordPerfect Office as his office suite and has a large collection of
files created in WordPerfect and QuatroPro.
In the past, OpenOffice did not handle WordPerfect files at all, but
KOffice’s word process (kword) did a decent job of reading .WPD
files. Since then, OpenOffice 2.2.x now has the ability to import
WordPerfect documents, but not perfectly. For example, embedded graphics
seem to be ignored completely. Since my dad doesn’t use very many
embedded graphics, this is only a minor issue.
For scanning, I set him up with kooka which aims to be a fairly
easy to use and is pretty intuitive. The OCR support is there, but I
haven’t played with it very much yet.
For dealing with digital photos, digikam is very nice. When we
tried to print digital photos to his HP photo printer, we could not get
them to come out right. One frustration was that digikam uses the KIPI
printwizard plugin which only offers a couple page sizes to choose from,
none of which matched what we were looking for (4x6 photo paper).
I borrowed some 4x6 paper and told my dad I’d experiment and find
a program he could use to print photos.
After experimenting with a bunch of programs (ksquirrel, gwenview,
showimg, to name a few), I ended up going back to digikam. I discovered
along the way that one of the page sizes digikam offered (10cm x 15cm) was
actually what we wanted. That’s roughly 4-inches x 6-inches! Works
great.
PAF 5, the program my dad used under Windows to do geneaology, is said
to work fine under Wine. It installed fine, but I haven’t played with
it to see how well it actually works. If the installation experience is any
indication, it may work splendidly.
