Challenges
The first challenge with helping Matt was that he was a long-time Macintosh user. Mac users tend to have higher standards about how well their user intefaces and experiences should work. Linux has a reputation for being weaker in this area, to the extent of being "not good enough" in some cases.
Matt needed a low budget solution, which ideally would involve installing Linux onto his existing 180 Mhz Umax PowerPC Mac clone. The machine would not officially support Mac OS X, and development of Mac OS 9 applications was stagnating, especially free, open source software.
He was beginning to do his own website development and wanted some professional tools to write HTML and CSS code, process images for his websites, and upload files to the server.
He was still tied to some Mac-specific applications, especially Quicken and FileMaker Pro.
Solution
I found that Debian Linux 3.0 supported his hardware, was free to download, and had a large number of packages available that were compatible with his hardware . It was a challenge in itself to install, but we found that all the desired software was available, and Matt was able to manage installing and upgrading new software once the system was in place.
Matt used Kate for document editting, the Gimp for photo editing, and Konqueror to manage file uploads.
OpenOffice easily open his existing Word documents.
I made the system dual-boot, so he could still access the Mac applications he needed.
The "Mac on Linux" project provides the promise of running the Mac OS inside of Linux/PPC, allowing access to both Mac and Linux applications at the same time. This never completely worked in his case, but booting into the Mac OS sometimes was a "good enough" solution.
Results
Matt was so impressed with Linux that he decided he wanted his next computer, a laptop, to run specifically Linux.
He was traveling around the country, and I was not going to be around to offer direct support. His new laptop came with Windows XP pre-installed. Despite having the license for it, he erased it completely from the system.
Although Windows XP was "free" with his computer, he didn't like the idea of supporting Microsoft and was concerned security issues with Windows. Also, he was not aware that there were options for free software as nice as what he had become used to using Linux.
I helped him install Linux on the laptop, but now I rarely receive tech support calls from him. He did mention that he had a hiccup after he purchased Mandriva Linux 10.0 to upgrade his own system. However, he had resolved the issue himself by the time he had scheduled to call me and consult about it.
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