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#12 Re: Question: Building Accessible Desktop Systems Posted by Anonymous (83.227.xx.xx) on Wed 13 Jul 2005 at 08:54 I did almost exactly the same thing with my girlfriends computer. My girlfriend is in her 30s and I guess what you would call an average computer user. I sold the idea to her by saying that debian will keep her old computer safer, stable, virus-free and more up to date than her current OS (win98) would be able to. The comp is an old p3 500, and gnome/kde is pretty slow on it. So here's what I used instead: Icewm is snappy, and can be configured to look just like the winxp my woman has at work. For icons I used idesk, which uses double-click and can be made to look very pretty. The icons also can't be messed with unless you know a lot more than my woman does. For file manager I used rox-filer. It doesn't use much resources, and offers the alternatives that she's used to from windows right-clicking. I set it up with an icon and the (hilarious) subtitle "My Computer" from the standard win98 interface :). For her mp3-player and usb, I used wmmount. She plugs the device, then opens wmmount from an icon. In wmmount she can 'connect' and 'disconnect' (that's how she thinks of it). It works like a charm with the usb, but I have a problem with the mp3-player: wmmount says that it's umounted while it's not quite done. I've taught my girlfriend to open an xterm and type 'df' to make sure the player is really unmounted before pulling it. It's no biggie, but far from ideal. I wanted her to use sylpheed-claws for mail because of its nifty clamscan plugin, but she refused, claiming it "wasn't pretty enough". Thunderbird on the other hand, she loves, which means I have to set up an mta virus filter instead. In addition to these choices, she uses firefox, openoffice and some non-free stuff for java, streaming media and p2p. As for games, pysol, supertux, frozen-bubble and chromium fill all of her needs but one: World of Warcraft. She can just barely play it in windows (since the computer is so old), but always the optimist, I decided to support cedega. I got the game running, but it was a tad bit slower than in windows, and that just wasn't acceptable since it's already pretty slow there. She still dual-boots, but only for WoW. I'll give cedega a new shot with the next patch, and we'll see about that :). All in all, she's very happy with her 'new' computer. It's fast and rock steady. And all I have to do now is an occasional apt-get update/upgrade from ssh.

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