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Can Linux Pick Up Users Abandoning Win98?
Mark writes, "When Microsoft announced the end of support for Windows 98 and Millennium Edition on June 30th, there was a lot of talk of these users migrating over to Linux desktops. In the weeks since this announcement, there is a very noticeable increase of activity on community boards and blogs from newbies asking questions about switching over to Linux, and how would they support their new systems." According to OneStat.com, Windows 98 and Windows ME account for about 4% of the total PCs in the world.
I recently pulled out my Windows 98 Celeron 300A with 128MB PC100 RAM, and 5400rpm 6GB drive, booted it up, and cracked open Netscape 4. You know what I found? Not much.
This machine has been sitting in a box for about 5 years, and as far as the time signatures are concerned, that rebuild was only about 7 months in. Office 2000 ran fine. Everything worked great -- I couldn't notice any difference with performance from my current Athlon machine when it comes to simple word processing and Web browsing. If I was ignorant to hotfixes and security, I'd be using this machine without any problems for many more years to come.
A simple reinstall of the OS -- as long as the disk is still healthy -- can stretch out the lifespan of any old machine, as long as you stick with the software of time, which isn't that much different than what Aunt June uses today.
body massage!
I switched my 800MHz Compaq Armada 110s to Ubuntu to purge it of the evil Windows Me long before they stopped 'supporting it'. (in my mind they stopped supporting the customer the day they released it)
The switch from Win 95/98/Me to Ubuntu is easy...and free... you should try it.
I used to have 98 on my laptop - "upgraded" to XP when it was released - it was too slow (Thinkpad A22e) - moved to redhat, tried xubuntu, and finally vector as of two weeks ago. Vector is by far the fastest and was the easiest to install, and I'm a big fan - sound took some work to get to work and I had the usual headache with the wireless card and ndiswrapper but took no more than 2-3 hrs and some forum searching in total. Xubuntu had no configuration problems (other than the expected wireless) but even that was a tad slow for my taste. If the hardware can support it Xubuntu is probably the way to go for non *nix familiar users. They will never have to look at a terminal and never have to learn one thing about how the OS works. But if they are slightly familar with a major distro, Vector (or DSL I hear but I have not tried) is the way to go.
No distro I've tried so far is simple as 98 but the learning curve isn't steep if you use icewm. Distros like Vector and xubuntu are great on older hardware, and can easily be faster than 98. I really don't think the hardware support is so much of an issue anymore. IMHO the biggest headache is the software since anyone still using 98 is completely used to a particular way of doing things and any difference won't be easily tolerated. I converted my mum to OpenOffice (on windows but still gotta start somewhere) at her company since its free but damn that took some work. The temporary frustration in learning to get used to the differences though is far outweighed by the costs. They saved a small fortune on Office licences, and basically all they needed was Word and Powerpoint. Now think savings on office + antivirus, a faster OS and active support and convincing them to change from 98 might be a bit easier.
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
By the way, CNET just did a little video telling people about Ubuntu Linux and how to download and run it from a disk so that they can give it a no-risk try.
? tag=cnetfd.mt
http://reviews.cnet.com/4660-10165_7-6639061.html
Justin - Don't be afraid of my blog, it won't bite.
This one fvwm95 would probably have been a better fit for her system. I've also installed enlightenment on a lot of P2/3 class machines for people I think will be able to adapt to a new desktop.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Tarantella has nothing to do with SCO, they just sold Caldera the SCO name. Don't be an idiot.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I believe Wine runs MS Office rather well. Just install $DISTRO and then install its Wine package. Ubuntu is always a good choice of distros. :-) If you want to be certain of running Office, buy a copy of Crossover Office.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
For my mother, at least...I was looking for an excuse to ditch 98 on her old Dell Latitude with a p2-400, 256mb ram, integrated (Neomagic) video - she wasn't really unhappy with Windows 98, but boy is she happier with Dapper. She tells all her coworkers that her son's got her using Linux and she loves it. All she does is use aMSN to talk to me, and browse the web, pay bills, e-mail, etc. Basic stuff, no doubt. Do I think that Linux seriously has a chance of picking up users in search of a replacement for 98/ME? No, and obviously my example is a special case. Honestly, Apple would have a great time picking up ex-9X users, if prices on Macs weren't so exclusive compared to PCs. I think linux's best chance in the market for "users" is to get a big vendor like Dell or HP to start including a mainstream distro like Ubuntu or SuSE on their low-to-midrange desktops, make it, say $50 less than the same Windows PC, guarantee it to work with their hardware, and support it in the rare occasion that a user breaks the install. If users looking for a ~$500 PC to replace their old 98 box see an alternative like that, maybe they would take a chance. Sorry, I was dreaming of a perfect world.
Is there a reason not to use the "official" Linux client from Citrix? My company is definitely beholden to MS, but they recently set up an Internet-accessible Citrix gateway to most of our internal apps. I went to the Citrix website and got the Linux client. Works for everything we use it for, anyway... Now I don't have to dig out my work laptop for every little thing when I'm at home!
Granted, I had to go install it myself - it would certainly make things much nicer to have a client ready to go in the distro's package manager.
As for getting them hooked into Linux - no chance! It might be free, but they have probably never heard of it, think that if it is free then there must be something wrong with it, and have no idea at all where they could get a copy of it, or what they would do with it if they did. JC, these people don't even have CD drives, much less DVD drives, and a free set of Ubuntu floppies can be obtained where?
Will those of you who think that you know what you are doing, get out of the way of those of us who know what we are doi
I can recommend crossover office. I've tried it, and was very pleased with the results.
heh 18 to 24 months old... i built my system in late 99 early 2000 (some time before 9/11/01 im sure) i put in 1 GB DDR, and a 1.7GHz K7, a nVidia GF 4700Ti, and one 40Gb Drive, since then i upgraded the graphics to a FX5600 about a year ago (probably more), and droped 2 120GB drives in it, and i still use it just fine. Plays UT2K4 fine, windows xp pro has an uptime of over a month before i shut it down, just to boot into linux so i can poke around in ubuntu. Infact theres not much my system cant handle, and its over 6 years old.... minus the graphics card (which still did pretty well in UT2K4 before i upgraded) and the drives which didnt cost too much, and have a practical use.... My Outdated comp runs better than most pre packaged compaq's and hp's because of all the trash they come pre loaded with the the insanely low ammounts of ram they come loaded with. These days i consider 1GB of ram to be pretty much minimum, if your luckey youll get away with 512.... anyway sorry to ramble on, im tired (zZz) and sick (or is that sick and tired) or hearing people bitch about people who run legasy hardware should be shot or laughed at because they cant/wont/dont upgrade, im here to tell you i cant afford to upgrade, i dont see a need to upgrade, and if when i have a need to upgrade, i dont have the money to do so, i wont upgrade. If on the other hand like some of the high class geeks whos mommies and daddies buy them everything i can magicaly come up with the money to upgrade u gladly will, ive been dyeing to try out one of the AMD 64 dual cores....
Noone writes jokes in base 13!
You have the wrong SCO. The original SCO developed Tarantella and sold all of the UNIX business to Caldera in 2001. Old SCO renamed itself to Tarantella. Caldera failed in their Linux venture and after a few years decided to rename themselves SCO. It is that 'new' SCO/old Caldera that is pulling all the stunts suing IBM. Tarantella/Old-SCO was bought by Sun last year.
Tarantella has supported Linux for a long time. Citrix has only ever done enough with Linux in order to not annoy Microsoft. There is no technical reason why Citrix couldn't have released a server product for Linux.
I do computer support to small business. Fuel stations, mechanics, farmers, small retailers. A lot of these people are 40+ and intend to computerize _once_. They have may specialist or POS software (often text mode, always windows) that often requires DOS, Novell 5 etc. compatibility. It was bought circa 1994 typically. They don't use the internet except for email or maybe a supplier gateway or two. They are very conservative and don't web surf - they leave what they don't know alone. They use text mode ribbon printers on the generic windows drivers.
Their computers typically run untouched for years. They keep all the disks well organised. I can replace failing hard drives but the newer hardware isn't as good as the old hardware and I feel guilty every time I replace a part.
These people aren't stupid. The software handles their taxes, its simple, they learnt it. They are the best people to deal with (spyware people are the worst!). The support for the niche sofware is often small scale and very good (much better than any large corp support). Anyone deriding these people is suffering from a solipsism of technophilia.
Then of course there are the supermarkets run on windows 3.1...
I guaren-fuckin-tee you can run linux on a windows 98 spec PC. You might not be able to run the latest and greatest bloat-distro but if you run anything the might *MIGHT* use the command line first before trying to set up X then you can run linux. Shit i have a linux server with 64 megs of ram, and a 600mhz cpu serving 2 websites and an email server. i call shenanigans on your statements.
uhh xandros comes bundled with crossover office a gui implement of WINE ( yes it costs & yes it works) and it should run access and Word, I use it for IE for web sites that have been asp'd. the other softwae she needs could come from open source. just do a cd or dvd backup before you deploy the switch over
Xubuntu (Ubuntu with XFCE) would probably run better. You'd probably want to run Abiword and Gnumetric instead of OO though. OO is a resource hog.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.