Presented Without Proof(an exercise for the reader)

Abbie and I are down visiting my folks in San Diego — My mom’s partner has been struggling with the transfer of 7 years’ work from his old XP machine to a new one running Windows 7; He’s been struggling with poor compatibility for literally months, with the new computer still setup on a card table and the old computer still indispensible.  Meanwhile, my mom’s computer is an ancient e-Machine with 256 MB of RAM and it takes 15 minutes to start up a web browser.  She’s been waiting to receive John’s old computer (which is certainly no spring chicken, but a big improvement over the present one).

So I come down with a salvaged Sempron 3800 box running Ubuntu Jaunty (total cost: $0) and quickly put that in place of my mom’s dinosaur.  Using VMWare Player (total cost: $0) we installed a bootleg copy of Win2k (total cost: $0, but not legally) in order to support her Quicken habit (GnuCash, my personal (though reluctant) choice for personal finances, sadly does not rise to the level).  On John’s end, the ancient CRM database program Q&A doesn’t run under Windows 7 but it does under dosbox; and Outlook express did not seem to be capable of transferring settings to regular-old outlook under Windows 7 (I didn’t work on this at all, but John assured me he spent a good bit of time) but Thunderbird imports it just fine… and finally, an old Agfa Snapscan e-20 is not yet supported on Windows 7, but the binary driver is still usable by xsane if it is extracted from the WinXP self-extracting executable (with a little help from wine; thanks to this post).

The only disappointment of the day was in how complicated it is to transfer a thunderbird profile from one computer to another- requiring showing hidden files and editing configuration files.  I could do it just fine, but it’s too complicated for John to do for someone else.  There is a ‘managed’ way to do it, but it requires installing another application (which is windows-only, by the way). Why is there [still] not an “export profile” option? It could just store the profile folder in an archive which can be imported elsewhere.  Maybe there’s a good reason for not doing this but I can’t think of it.

So minor config issues notwithstanding, OSS is finally reaching the level of being generally usable by the broader public.

UPDATE 2009-12-28

More good news: my Dad and his fiancée will be using my Wordpress installation to host their wedding page, which will be found at monaandron.com and hosted (presently) by FreeBSD.

Then some bad: Thunderbird 3.0 has another big FAIL: clicking “get mail” doesn’t get mail??  The configuration interface has also changed in subtle ways that make it very difficult to troubleshoot problems for non-tech-savvy family members over the phone.  Very frustrating.