Linux Migration - Day Zero

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My family computer is the second Dell we have had with XP Home for the kids gaming entertainment and dual booting Linux mainly for my doing the books. Under XP we have used open source applications for the most part: Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org. So off to a great start for migration.

Prior to allowing kids to play on the computer my wife had been using Linux with our first Dell. Then she just stuck with XP instead of having to keep rebooting for the kids. They had acquired many educational and gaming CD's over the years.

Recently I have inherited two higher end machines yet only one is complete and another just a cpu and motherboard. I have plans to use one for the family and the other for a server. Problem is I don't care to shell out for a new XP license. I got by with the second Dell we inherited because we simply just plopped in our drive from the first Dell and kept on going. These new machines are not Dells.

So I now evaluate how we will fare on the current Dell using Linux. I spent the weekend merging data from the XP side into my wifes old account. I first started with a new KDE setup and simply used the same background as set in XP and using the default Fedora 7 KDE theme. I fired up Firefox which creates her profile. Copy important character setting files from the XP side into the new Linux profile. On first launch and all her themes and extensions work great! Oddly enough even some Windows-only extensions worked but didn't need them. (I had installed a auto copy on highlight for Windows use.) Thunderbird on the XP side is in a 'Thunderbird' directory and needed to be '.thunderbird' on the Linux side, but worked flawless as well. Pidgin also came in fine but still working out some kinks with sound. Seems gstreamer can't find its way out of the speakers but perhaps because I have two sound cards.

The kids are very much used to having tons of icons on the desktop for finding their favorite gaming websites. Problem is they don't work the same on the KDE desktop. For this I simply bookmarked them into a personal toolbar folder and showed my wife where this was. The kids have not had the chance to check it out yet but it did not go un-noticed. They thought daddy erased all their games. In their mind they think this is still XP. I had to keep reassuring my wife that Windows is still there (I just set Linux as the Grub default) for when they want to play CD games. Change so far is not faring well as I was not prepared for this initial squabble over missing icons. This all said before they have actually even sat down and tried anything.

Soon they will discover a whole new world of card/board games, arcade and shoot 'em up games galore I have installed. Eventually I will be testing their CD games in wine or other emulators; any suggestions here are welcome.

We're also testing out the auto-login feature that should kick in after 5 seconds or they can just hit enter as I set my wifes account to be the default selected and not require password. Physical access is king anyway right?

I want my wife to know how to use Gnucash too. For this I created a new group both of our users are members of. I moved our Gnucash files out of my home user and into the common home directory where we can both access. Set the group id for the directory to this new group. This way any modification to the files will allow either of us to make changes even if she or I are the owner.

Will soon see how Day One goes next.