PCLOS 2010.10 is a sucess!

[rm]

A family I converted over to Linux a while back called me yesterday to see if I can help them understand how their daughter can do her homework.  I didn't know what trouble they are running into, but I suspected it was just a matter of setting OpenOffice to save in DOC format by default for her.  It was a couple of years ago when I initially wiped their virus infested hard drive and installed Fedora for them.  (PCLOS was having some few issues at the time.)  So, I went to their house last night armed with a new PCLinuxOS 2010.10 CD.

Turns out their youngest daughter is going through home schooling and the website she needs to get her assignments from does not work with Firefox.  I said that the first thing we needed to do was to install PCLinuxOS.  I was hoping that the problem would go away when using the latest Firefox, but it didn't.  I then installed an add-on that allows it to spoof the user agent, and that allowed it to go farther.  However, the code was evidently not compatible and would not work right.  I gave Opera a try.  Same thing.

So, it looked like I was going to have to install IE for them.  I looked for Wine Doors or IES4Linux, but neither seems to be maintained and are not on the repos any more.  I was starting to get nervous.  Their machine has only 500 MB of RAM.  So, running a VM did not seem like a nice prospect.  Besides, they would have to buy a Windows license.

I ran the website one more time to look at the error message again.  It said that the browser needed to be upgraded to Internet Explorer 6, 7, or 8, or Netscape Navigator (some version).  I took a peek at Synaptic to see if by chance there would be a Navigator install available.  There was!  I installed Netscape, went to the website and it worked perfectly.  T'was a success!

PCLinuxOS is a beautiful thing.  I made a few tweaks on everyone's desktops.  For the youngest daughter I used one of the built in wallpapers - the one that has a little sail boat with PCLinuxOS written on it.  What a beautiful wallpaper. Their printer worked with no fuss.  They were all very pleased with the result.  Thanks to every one that has contributed to making this the best Linux distro ever!

[dixonpete]

I'm having a LOT of success with Chromium, it might have worked as well.

And ya, 2010.10 is a beautiful thing..

[menotu]

Lovely post rm

[pags]

An excellent testimony to PCLOS!

Also, a scathing indictment of whatever website they had to access.  The webmaster should be contacted, and informed that there are open standards that should be followed, that will increase the exposure and availability of the site's content to a greater audience...

Anyway, great news that a (relatively) simple fix was possible 

[menotu]

Also, a scathing indictment of whatever website they had to access.  The webmaster should be contacted, and informed that there are open standards that should be followed, that will increase the exposure and availability of the site's content to a greater audience...

++1

[nerdful1]

This reminds me to write to the companies for the ONLY 2 reasons my wife has to dual boot to windows.

One is Gotomeeting.com, and the other is  Investor's Toolkit.

They have the usual excuse 'not enough people on linux to bother making it accessible to them.'

Gotomeeting has been behind regarding mac users, but they spoke up enough to get them to make a mac version eventually.