My step mother has decided that Linux isn't right for her. She has her reasons, I'm sure, so I'm not going to fight her (especially since it's her computer). I'm fairly sure the kernel panics have something to do with it. Allow me to explain:

Every once in a while, her computer would freeze while in X. This means nothing could be entered via the keyboard, mouse, etc. Nothing would respond, including switching terminals. At first I thought it was the leaky Firefox. I told her to make sure she closed out after every session, just to be on the safe side. A few days later, though, she informed me that the problem still persisted.

I'm going to copy her logs tonight and just see if I can make any sense of obvious failures/errors. Hopefully something will point me in the right direction. Tomorrow, though, I will sadly install Windows XP on her old old old computer. One can only breathe a heavy sigh and accept defeat. I will take a page out of K.Mandla's book and not install antivirus on her computer. I will just do a vanilla install, wash my hands of the situation, and she'll figure out the rest.

On the brighter side, I tried awesome for the first time two nights ago. It was an interesting experience, and I think I'd vastly enjoy the window manager if I had a keyboard that had a super key ("windows" key). I use a model m, so I had to re-map Mod4 to Caps Lock. I don't consider this elegant, but it still did the trick.

I dropped learning kind-of quickly as I was extremely tired when I tried it and didn't want to have a majorly bad impression of the program. In the future I hope to be able to pull away from floating WMs and use tiling full time.

Labels: awesome, failure, linux, windows, windows manager