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Granny computingGranny computingPosted Nov 13, 2009 4:35 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753)In reply to: New Linux-Based PCs Encourage Seniors To Learn The Internet (redOrbit) by samroberts Parent article: New Linux-Based PCs Encourage Seniors To Learn The Internet (redOrbit)
Any recommendations? What do other people do to set their grandparents up? I can't be the only person doing this! I wrote about my similar experiences about a year ago in this LWN comment, which also got one informative followup. Some added detail: Whats the simplest email client? The simplest photo viewer? The simplest browser? We used a simple free webmail service, and I think it the best solution as it allows access to mail and the mail archive also from other computers if needed, and with the familiar interface. I used a local "Wippies" service, but in retrospect Gmail might have been better because it can display many Microsoft-format attachments without requiring them to be downloaded. The browser is Firefox. I think less-common browsers are not good in this context because you want all pages to render without quirks as much as possible. Technical explanations about web standards and how many pages break them won't convince the granny. Photo viewer was a bit of a problem. For a long time it was not needed, when it was, an immediate good solution was not installed on the machine and I was not at hand to help except by phone (I live some 300km away). I too would like to hear a good suggestion. Something that works just like a "slide projector" (one program on the machine was close but the UI was a bit too complex and I could not find out how to make it step through a directory full of pictures in a sane order: apparently the program used whatever was the directory entry order... i.e. essentially random).
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Granny computing Posted Nov 14, 2009 16:00 UTC (Sat) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
Any mouse dragging is a problem in my experience, as sometimes people drag things without realising it. GNOME is as bad as Windows in this respect (panel is easily dragged to the side of the screen where it's very hard to drag it back if there are lots of icons - no spare space withouth icons! You can lock down the GNOME panel at least - see http://library.gnome.org/admin/deployment-guide/ for this and other lockdowns.
I've also had to write a simpler version of the standard GNOME clock applet which doesn't show a calendar at all, just the date/time - this was confusing someone who would click this without realising and then not know how to hide the calendar (it would help if it was a standard window with an 'X' to close). Fortunately PyGTK makes this quite easy.
Granny computing Posted Nov 14, 2009 19:44 UTC (Sat) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] GNOME is as bad as Windows in this respect (panel is easily dragged to the side of the screen [...]Same thing in KDE, and yes it has caused confusion with the relatives I support... It really is a stupid misfeature no matter how one looks at it. It is not like changing the panel location is so common operation that it needs such a shortcut.
Granny computing Posted Nov 14, 2009 22:03 UTC (Sat) by ABCD (subscriber, #53650) [Link]
>> GNOME is as bad as Windows in this respect (panel is easily dragged to
>> the side of the screen [...] > > Same thing in KDE, and yes it has caused confusion with the relatives I > support... It really is a stupid misfeature no matter how one looks at > it. It is not like changing the panel location is so common operation > that it needs such a shortcut.
And it appears that, at least in 4.3.74 (that is, current trunk), KDE4 no longer has that behavior (to move the panel to a different edge, you now have to explicitly request it).
Granny computing Posted Nov 14, 2009 23:36 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
With recent versions of GNOME, this is not the case
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f11/es-ES/sec...
Granny computing Posted Nov 15, 2009 0:36 UTC (Sun) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
That's good - unfortunately Ubuntu 8.04 LTS has GNOME 2.22, which does have this problem until end of support in 2011, though it's replaced next year by 10.04 LTS.
Granny computing Posted Nov 15, 2009 18:17 UTC (Sun) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]
Yeah, my daughter is constantly "rearranging" my desktop for me and when she moves my top panel to one of the sides (I have a widescreen monitor) all my icons are shoved together and there's NO space to move the panel back again. Serious PITA: I used to have to delete icons until I found space.
What I did was enable the "hide" buttons on the panel. Even though I never use them to hide the panel, it's handy to have that space to drag it around. It will be nice to have this harder to do by accident (although my daughter is doing it on purpose :-))
Granny computing Posted Nov 15, 2009 22:29 UTC (Sun) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
At least in GNOME, it's quite easy to lock the panels with gconf-editor - see my other post. KDE supports this in bleeding edge versions, as someone mentioned.
Granny computing Posted Nov 16, 2009 13:54 UTC (Mon) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]
This seems to make the panels completely immutable: that's not what I want. I just want them to not move, but I still want to be able to move things around in the panel and add things to the panel. Maybe I missed it but I didn't see anything that allowed just the movement to be disabled.
Granny computing Posted Nov 17, 2009 9:02 UTC (Tue) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
There is a panel-movement lockdown feature in Ubuntu 8.10 onwards that is a bit easier to use, which might help: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/moving-the-locked-top-panel... - it points to this GNOME bug https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309721
I believe this 'lock panel movement' feature is what you want.
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