On Sun, Jul 30, 2006 at 05:30:03PM -0400, Charles MacDonald wrote: > She has had occasional problems connecting to > http://www.ishares.com/ which resulted in her falling back to her > old Windows 95 machine. The linux box did not connect while the W95 > box did. The other day the same thing happened with > http://globeinvestor.com/ Not much info to go on, but this could potentially be the MTU thing I mentioned earlier today. > She would like sound working in full duplex. The built in sound on > the HP motherboard does not work, we tried a SB live card, but the > HP would not shut off its built-in card so the SB live won't work > for her. Shutting off the onboard sound is not a requirement for using an additional card. However, unless you disable the kernel module for the onboard card, you'll have two soundcards available. If the first one is the onboard card, then that's the default. You can reconfigure the system to use the second one by default. > We had to play arround to get the Brother MFC to print, finaly > manualy configuring for a previous version of the Brother printer, > She is not sure if the printer is working as well as it can, and has > not attempted to make use of the scanner function. MFCs tend to be a pain, I hear. However, with CUPS and the entire "foomatic" database installed (the "foomatic-filters-ppds" package in Debian, dunno about SuSE), you can pretty much select your printer by point and click. Never had problems with that setup. And I didn't choose any of the printers I use it with, either. Maybe I just got lucky. > The other day someone sent her a PDF file which for some reason > would not open on her system, even though it worked fine on my > machine (Suse 10) and again she had to open the files in the old > Win95 nachine and print them on the old panasonic printer on that > machine. Tried 'xpdf'? Seems to be the most compatible PDF viewer I've used. If that doesn't work, then you'd better have a Windows system on standby for this kind of thing, because I don't think it gets any better than xpdf. > The PDF files in question were made with Acrobat Distiller 6.0.1 > from a Corel office document on a windows machine. I've never opened a Distiller document that didn't raise a ton of warnings. Way to ignore your own PDF specifications, Adobe. > She has threatend to throw the machine in the laneway and run it > over with her Minivan. I'm not sure any other system would be better, frankly. You'll still have most of the same problems: Same printer to deal with, and probably the same PDF problem and the same network issue. You can possibly fix the network thing with an MTU fix, probably leave the printer driver alone if it works okay, and possibly switch to xpdf to solve the PDF problem. The only thing a new system will really immediately solve is the sound, and even that can be solved by software. Of course, if a new system is what it takes to convince her that everything is okay, then sure, whatever. I'm just not optimistic that getting a new Linux system is going to make all these issues magically go away. :) > She is not interested in Games, and really Wants nothing to do with > Windows, but was tempted after the last failure of those PDF's to > ask if she could get Windows 98SE2 for the HP, which was the last > operating system that they used where she worked shortly before she > retired... I hope I don't get lynched for saying this on a Linux list, but from what I hear, if you're *really* stuck with Windows, then you probably want to get XP rather than 98. That is, if you're willing to actually pay Microsoft for a copy. It's not just UI fluff -- the NT kernel is superior to the DOS one; you don't have all those weird DOS disk size issues; stability and mean-time-between-reinstalls is majorly improved (again, from what I hear); and you'd also be getting a version that is actually still supported. (By the community and the hardware makers, of course, not the vendor.)
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