Oh lord, my parents need this. Their computer is CONSTANTLY getting messed up, probably from the buttload of games my mother keeps downloading. Every time we visit, my husband will spend HOURS fixing it. Unfortunately, he only gets up there once, maybe twice a year.

Do all the common windows-friendly programs run on xubuntu? or does everything need to be converted to an open-source equivalent, for ex: office, web browsing (they HAVE firefox, but they are confused! and scared! by it. ugh), itunes, etc?

what the hell? I only clicked the button once! friggin' double post!

Did you have any problems with Wifi?

I tried Ubuntu sometime last year-- and spent hour upon hours, trying to get mine to work. It was temperamental at best.

I did not try Xubuntu, however.

I installed ubuntu two days ago into my mother-in-law's pc.
I recommend it to everyone.
My brother, two sisters, mother and step-father have it installed.
It is not only the future. It is also the present.
Cheers!

@ESC - there are some commercial programs that you can buy for linux that will run windows apps. come to think of it i have seen some opensource ones also.

instead of going that route i have kept her computer all open source. she was on firefox prior to her last virus so i figured this wouldn't be big change at all. hell, if i had found a theme that looked like winxp she would never know difference except toolbars are switched. i would have told she had broken windows if she asked.

i use open office on my pc so i figured she could use it too if she needed.

itunes? nope. but if you install automatix it will have many extras like songbird, which in many aspects is better for someone without a lot of software savvy. i wrote this up about a year ago about songbird.

i would recommend putting them on it if your husband wants to put in some time upfront and relax later.

@Alain - "Did you have any problems with Wifi?"

no trouble at all. i had read that it might be an issue with the atheros card that was in the laptop and prepared for an uphill battle. in the end it was not an issue.

two things that did slow me down were getting flash installed correctly. QVC.com is loaded with flash stuff and she would have freaked if she couldn't see the animations. The other was getting her sound card to work.

I installed some extra controls for it through Automatix that made troubleshooting easy. By default it had muted every channel output. Once fixed I was able to hand it off. With a quick lesson - power up, type in pass, click firefox and surf.

What I like about Xubuntu was that it is a very barebones setup. Plus, I didn't have much of a choice on her laptop because it didn't have enough ram to run ubuntu.

Is that Xubuntu 6.10?

@Wayne - close, 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon. i downloaded 'alternate install' iso to get the text installer.

i am usually gui all the way but the it's a nice option to have in a low ram pinch. the standard version will load the OS into memory and then attempt an install. i say attempt because with too little ram the install will freeze up.

all the US xubuntu versions are here. And all the support you need can be found at the ubuntu forums. any tweaks or small issues i found the answer here.

I have an old K6-2 400mhz running 6.10 which runs really well. I've been meaning to upgrade to 7.10. Perhaps I'll give it a shot. Thanks Kris.