Advice... Linux for recovery and replacement for XP

[Zadock]

Afternoon folks,

I just want to get a quick opinion from you all.

My mum works in an FE college and she had a student come to her today a bit distraught... the long and short is it sounds like her OS (XP I think) is fubar, the menu comes up saying that windows didn't shutdown properly previously but will not load in normal or safemode.

The student doesn't have a copy of windows for whatever reason (lost? pirate? who knows) and she isn't very well off. I suggested using a linux livecd (which I will provide my mum with to take into work to give her) to recover her files; but you can do that with pretty much any distro that supports NTFS.

My question is, for someone who isn't computer literate and is female what distro would you suggest if she is likely to be using it as her main OS? Ubuntu springs to mind and I have 8.10 knocking around but mint is rather shiney and possibly more user friendly?

I'm going to have to write a brief guide on how to use it to, any ideas and opinions are welcome I want to make this as easy as possible for the poor lass.

Sorry for any lack of details, I should have more when I get home later.

[directhex]

Sounds reasonable enough to me. Wifey is now happily running Intrepid on her AA1, having replaced the default OS. It needn't be scary.

[Zadock]

Cheers, I was reasonably sure it was a sound idea.

I handed over the disk and a quick FAQ with some screen shots to my mum this morning. Thankfully the girl doesn't have wifi because that could have complicated things, hopefully it will be a painless transition. Who knows she might not want to go back to windows again after using it. If I thought she was more computer savvy I would've gone for one of the more shiny distros... perparing to get flamed here but I've always found that women prefer form over function, they then of course moan when they can't get something to work and its usually your fault (the bloke).

[directhex]

wireless is fine on ubuntu 8.10 in my experience

[kalniel]

wireless is fine on ubuntu 8.10 in my experience

Mixed in mine. Was fine under 32bit but not 64bit for me. If anyone has a dead simple non-thread-derailing way of getting and installing 64bit drivers for an edimax 7128g pci card onto the (now) non-internet capable PC I'd be grateful

[cheesemp]

I never got WPA working in ubuntu (however my laptop is running 7.04, then upgraded >7.10, 8.04, 8.10 which might be screwing it up.) I've have tried 3 different cards.

[MSIC]

I'm beginning to wonder if gOS is actually a better Linux flavour for people who are really new to the idea (ie "i didnt know that there was anything other than windows!").
It has a Mac-like dock at the bottom, and the icons are fairly large, and simple.
Also it's not horrible Ubuntu-brown (i like Ubuntu, i use it, but come on..... brown ???)

[Zadock]

I'm beginning to wonder if gOS is actually a better Linux flavour for people who are really new to the idea (ie "i didnt know that there was anything other than windows!").
It has a Mac-like dock at the bottom, and the icons are fairly large, and simple.

So does Dream... More and more stuff seems to be working out of the box, its only going to get better.

I managed to get the wifi working on my eee with WPA in ubuntu.

[Maccer101]

WPA works fine in 8.04, mind you I run 32bit

[aidanjt]

Mixed in mine. Was fine under 32bit but not 64bit for me. If anyone has a dead simple non-thread-derailing way of getting and installing 64bit drivers for an edimax 7128g pci card onto the (now) non-internet capable PC I'd be grateful

Yes, throw it in the bin, and get a wireless card that doesn't require windows drivers.

[aidanjt]

WPA works fine in 8.04, mind you I run 32bit

wpa_supplicant doesn't care what architecture you run. Most decent wireless cards has a native driver available for it, in which case it will work with both x86 and x86_64 CPUs.