My mum is using Linux!!!

My family is Chinese, and as my mum is the earlier generation in this region(Singapore/Malaysia to be specific), she is hardly English literate. Not least computer literate. But she does have one motivation to use the computer, that is to talk to my sister over skype. She is in M'sia & my sister & I are in Singapore. That is 530km away or a good 6 hours of drive at 110km/h.

So she was compelled to use a computer that I put up at her home running 24/7 and doubling up as some sort of a server. I have recently converted her windows pc to a Fedora Core 4. Few problems encountered were as follow:

1. Running Azureus with the correct java version. This is fixed by installing Sun's java & removing
the version of java that came with FC4.
2. Configuring VNC server for my remote access. Remote Desktop is built-into FC4 & what I needed
to set it up are:
a. Setting a password in Remote Desktop & disabling 'confirmation by user'.
b. Enabling VNC server in 'services'.
c. Adding 5900:tcp to selinux's firewall rules.
d. Getting ddclient to update the dynamic ip assigned by my isp to dyndns.org.

ddclient was also available from yum install, but I couldn't get it working right after few trials with the settings in the /etc/ddclient/conf. Eventually, found the dynamic dns updating feature in my netgear WGT624 router. And so ddclient is no longer needed & all I have to do is get the router to update it's ip to dyndns.org.

And so, now, my mum is learning to get used to the new interface of FC4 & using skype in Linux.

Also, it turns out that, when I do a VNC to that pc in M'sia from Singapore, FC4's vnc server is much more responsive than vnc server in windows. And that pc needed atleast 768MB+ to run without lag in windows. Now, it runs even smoother in FC4, with the same sets of softwares in both OSs.

With the last few glitches in FC5 I resolved today, soon I will be converting her pc to FC5, when I have the next chance to go back to her home in Malaysia.