[lug] Linux for my Dad?

[Frederic Herman]

John Dollison wrote:

>My father is looking to replace a VERY old computer with a newer model, but
>doesn't want to spend much money on it, since he only uses it for solitaire,
>e-mail, and occasional web-surfing (at 56K).  He's been looking at the
>WalMart computers ($200 - $400) that come with your choice of Lycoris or
>Lindows.  I have no experience with either.  Dad's not a computer geek like
>me, he just wants to plug it in and use it, without worrying about
>configuring much of anything.  He lives out of state, so I can't help him
>much if he gets stuck.
>
>Does anyone out there have any experience with Lycoris or Lindows, or
>Wal-Mart PC's in general?  Or should I just mail him a Windoze Millenium CD,
>and walk him through an install of that?  It seems that Wal-Mart has been
>selling Linux PC's for well over a year now, so maybe it's really working
>for the Average Joe?
>--
>John D
>_______________________________________________
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>  
>
I just got one for my daughter (Xmas present).  Since I maintain RedHat 
machines, I decided to install RH9.0 on it.  My only problem was with 
the integrated sound.  While I got it mostly working with the stock 
install, the sound for flash games was "choppy" even though the machine 
was on a T1 connection to the game web sites.  I could play CD's through 
the internal sound and the event sounds worked fine.  Just no flash 
sound, which I needed for my 3 year old daughter's games.

I screwed around with upgrading alsa drivers and adding the suggested  
module mapping, I couldn't get the sound for flash to work properly.  I 
spent a lot of time googeling for suggestion and tried everything I 
could come up with.  Nothing worked.  I'm convinced that the sound is 
like a winmodem and is even called a soft sound controller.  I gave up 
and bought a $20 Soundblaster 16 card from Compusa.  After installing 
and configuring the new SB16, sound worked fine for everything.

If you use the Lycoris installation, you may not have a problem.  
Lycoris may have a driver from the MB manufacturer.  Worst case, buy a 
SB16 card for $20.

I would recommend adding more memory.  The machine has 2 memory slots, 
although the MB docs say 4.  I'm adding more memory to my box.

HTH

Fred