Matto Fransen <matto@xs4all.nl> wrote:
> My wife has a friend who experienced one worm too much and is now
> willing to make the switch to Linux :-)

> This women is a clueless user, so mutt won't be the best choise
> for mail client :-) This goes for most apps we use everyday.
>
> Now, what shall I put on the machine for her ?
>
> -wm: fvwm95 (this will look familiar to her) or one those
> 'modern' desktops like gnome or kde (in order to let her
> use a graphical file manager).

I prefer Gnome myself, but in my experience most old Windows users prefer
and feel quite comfortable with KDE.

> -browser: she will be less understanding in the matter of
> browser-incompatibility due to bad webdesigners. What would be the
> best choice, Mozilla or Konqueror or .. ?

Galeon is a really nice browser.

> -email-client: she will be receiving html-mail (like produced
> by incredimail) and probably want to compose html-mail too. Also
> clicking on URL's should open them in the browser. The email-client
> should be as easy to use as possible. Yes, I know html-mail is evil
> (but she doesn't and will probably never understand why).

Sylpheed is a very nice email client, it is not included with Slackware,
but you could download it from http://sylpheed.good-day.net/
It doesn't produce html mail thogh and it doesn't do html formatting to
html mail, but the incoming html mail looks really good as text mail.

> -graphical stuff: I don't know yet, but it might be possible
> that she has a digital camera. If so, a simple application to do some
> simple things (like resising) with jpg's is nessesairy.

Maybe gimp is overkill for the resizing? To get the images from the camera
you might be able to mount it or use gphoto depending on the camera model.
To make it easy to mount the camera, add a user entry to fstab and a KDE
icon on the desktop. Then show her how to rightclick on that icon to mount
and umount the camera and explain that she should umount it before
disconnecting it.

> I am not sure wether open office or one of the kde/gnome office suites
> would be the best choice (in terms of "integration" with the
> filemanager).

For my mother which doesn't use computers much and is a bit over 60 years
I have set up an environment based on Slackware 8 with KDE, Sylpheed,
Galeon, Konqueror and Netscape. With Slack 8 Netscape was necessary to use
some web-pages. With Slackware 9.1 I have still not found any web-page
which doesn't work fine with Galeon.

regards Henrik
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