Moms Go Linux, And Other Windependence Winners

An anonymous reader writes "There's an entertaining article over at DesktopLinux.com entitled "Why Aren't All Our Moms Running Linux?", one of the winners of their recent wIndependence Day essay contest. From the introduction: 'Why aren't all our moms running Linux? This is a serious question, so don't laugh. I used to get phone calls about once a week, on average; it's my mom, telling me that "my computer is running out of virtual memory" or "my email keeps beeping at me" or "I can't read this document" or (the best one) "my computer is *broken*." I knew that, at the time, she was of course not running Linux. Then, one day, listening to yet another complaint, it hit me. Why aren't all our moms running Linux on their computers?" Maybe it's the cuddly Penguin logo? ;-)" They're adding the winning entries to the site week by week - I wonder how many are from Slashdot readers.

Comments

Leave an icon to this script on her desktop...

[dmaxwell]

/sbin/ifconfig|grep "inet addr">/tmp/ipoutput
gdialog --textbox /tmp/ipoutput 5 70
rm /tmp/ipoutput

# End of script

Then you say "Mom just read what it says on the screen......"

Of course if her problem is getting online in the first place then this will be less than helpful. Be sure you set that up correctly!

Oh yeah, install gdialog while you're at it.

I know; I know; it's very quick and verrrry dirty but I'm not going to play with sed to make it look pretty just so I get an extra karma point. :-)

ps. The lameness filter screws it up if I put in the #!/bin/bash like I'm supposed to. Grrrrr!

Still more effort than is needed

[TFloore]

Why even do that much?

Use one of those nice temp dns services, and you just ssh to mymom.dyndns.org or something like that. Check out www.dyndns.org and see what they offer.

Set up a script on the linux box that updates the dyndns entry every time it connects, and you don't even have to ask mom to read anything off the screen. And you don't ahve to worry about your own typos when she reads the numbers out either.