Linux for the Totally Clueless: Computing for a Mexican Grandma

Their computer works, but they don’t know how to use it

The modern corollary to the cobbler’s children who go barefoot is the system adiminstrator’s mother who does not have a computer she knows how to operate. Three of my wife’s four brothers are systems administrators for large, mulitnational corporations in Mexico. They have engineering degrees from fine universities. On average, I’ll bet they visit their parents for a meal at least once per week. Their parents have a computer at home we bought for them a couple of years ago. Their sons have improved the computer by adding memory and up-to-date hardware and software. Neither of my wife’s parents have any clue about how to use the thing.

The reason we got them the computer is because we live in the United States while they live in Mexico. The idea was that we could trade emails with them and they could view pictures of their grandchildren on our web page. It would be nice to be able to take pictures of their grandchildren who live in Mexico to display on the computer and to send to us up here in the United States. They would like to be able to print out a picture every now and then, too. They have all the equipment and programs they need, but for two years, no one has taken the time to show them how to do all this. I have been pretty depressed about the whole state of affairs, but we are planning a trip to Mexico later this month and I have a plan. I am going to install Ubuntu Linux on their computer and teach them how to use it for email, web browsing, and snapshot processing.

The perfect test case: Total cluelessness

My wife’s parents are good, bright, hardworking people, but they do not have a high level of education. My father-in-law, Lauro, is a retired bank teller. The most sophisticated machine he used in his work was an electric typewriter. My mother-in-law, Conchita, is a seamstress. She operates a laundromat at their home, using paper and pencil to handle the limited amount of accounting required for her small home businesses. They are exceptional in that they put three of their boys through engineering school on a very limited budget in an area where most never even graduate from high school. Their fourth son is a successful businessman. I married their only daughter. Lauro and Conchita do not speak English nor know the first thing about operating a home computer. They have to wait for someone to operate the computer for them to read the emails we send and view the images we post on our web site.

All of my computer guru brothers-in-law work almost exclusively with computers that run Microsoft Windows. They are responsible for the care and feeding of literally thousands of computers on two continents. They have had an interest in Linux, but not much cause to use it other than for the occasional server or embedded application. It would be a lot more fun if this were a thumb-in-the-eye, knock-down, drag-out fight to win my in-laws over to Linux against the express wishes of the nefarious Windows using brothers-in-law, but it is not. They are intrigued by Linux both for professional reasons and because it is cool, so they are going to either help or, at least, not get in the way while I am getting Lauro and Conchita up and running on Linux.

The plan: Ubuntu Linux, Firefox, and F-Spot

Some will know that I am in the process of writing a series of posts on how to build a great homeschool computer that runs Linux. You can find the introductory posts here, here, and here. I will buy new hardware, install the upcoming 5.10 version of Ubuntu Linux (Breezy Badger) and the additional software packages we use in our homeschool, and explain the installations and how we use different packages in the administration of our homeschool. This undertaking has a more limited scope. The entire scope of the project is to explain how to prepare and use a computer to perform the following three tasks:

Browse the web with Firefox

Read and write email using free web based email provided by yahoo or google

Download images from a digital camera, process the images, and upload the images to the internet

Of course there are more steps to performing this installation than just three. The biggest task, by far, will be to create step-by-step instructions in Spanish and English with photographs for users who are not computer literate. I have found that such end users often feel more comfortable with printed instructions in their hands. One of the easiest ways to organize the web based needs of a neophyte user is to make up a simple web page that has all the links they would normally visit and then make that web page the start page on browser start up. The start page we create will not be on a web site, rather it will just be an html file in the home directory of the computer we set up.

Photographs: Downloading from the camera, editing, and uploading to a web gallery

F-Spot is a cool snapshot management program. It is not yet mature, but it is really quite good for the majority of the kinds of photo editing tasks that I will be able to teach my father-in-law in the time I will have in Mexico. The main things he will want to be able to do are to rotate, crop, and resize images and possibly retouch them to remove red eye. Then he will want to be able to upload them to a web gallery.

One of my brothers-in-law wants me to set him up a web site where he can post images of his paintings and write a blog. I will not go into the setting up of that web site in this series of posts as that is something I will be covering in my series of posts on setting up a homeschool Linux computer, but I will refer the reader to my wonderful web hosting service, eChristianWebhosting.com, and describe how to upload images using one of the several gallery programs they have available on their service.