On Sat, 08 May 2004 19:53:27 +0000, Matto Fransen wrote:

<SNIP>

> -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).

Use Kde and theme it.. so it looks like XP, she'll not know the difference
if she's as 'clueless' as you say.

> -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 .. ?

Just use mozilla and get a theme for it so that it mimic's windows
internet exploder.

> -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).

She would probably like Evolution: if she's used to using Outlook, it's
like an outlook clone.

> -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.

Well I wouldn't inflict The Gimp on a new user, good as it is. How about
something like Kview though?. I think it has resizing options & like
another poster has already mentioned put an option in fstab to mount the
camera and a nice icon on her desktop to 'automagically' mount it and
display a nice folder with previews of each file in it.

> Because she will be used to 'click on something to make things
> happen', 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).

Openoffice would probably be the best choice.. it is a little bulky and
slow though imo, but is the best choice for someone who's (probably) used
to using MS Word and the like from MS Office

> I haven't use kde or gnome myself, and prefer text based
> interfaces, which makes ik hard for me to predect what would
> be the best solution for people like her.
> So any input on that matter is appreciated :-)

As you can see from my above comments, I'd probably set it up to mimic XP
in every way possible, take a look on kde-look.org at some of the XP
themes on there- quite impressive stuff. One more thing, as another poster
stated, edit the kde menu (kmenuedit) - a lot of new users to kde/gnome
are very confused about the amount of programs that get installed by
default, consider removing a lot of these programs (if not from the whole
system, then just from the menu's) and changing the menu item name so for
example, rather than having 'xmms' as the name of the music player, change
it to 'play mp3's' or something...

Anyway I hope that helps =)


Paul Mc