I spent 5 hours last weekend trying to get rid of the multitude of the viruses and bugs that had taken over my parent's laptop. Apparently they literally had little bugs and critters running around their screen singing and playing music.
I tried two antivirus programs but neither could clean out everything. I finally gave up and asked them about their usage patterns. Turns out they use the laptop fairly exclusively for the web - banking, booking flights, etc. I suggested installing linux and surprisingly they were up for it.
So here I am trying the Hardy Heron beta install on their laptop. First impressions: nice installer! It detects the screen dimensions correctly (and it's not a standard size display). An attractive background pops up and you're in a nice windowed mouse based installer.
The Prepare disk space step is taking a very long time - I wonder if it's still alive?
It comes back with an error - there was an error in resizing - but when I hit back and try again it seems to work.
Too many blank or non-responsive screens - is it still alive or dead?
Dead I guess, it seemed to not be doing anything.
After a reboot the install seems to be going well. I'm impressed that it's only a few questions and clicks before it starts the actual install - that's very good.
And it's done. Overall, quite nice. It's automatically picked out the correct screen size, wireless and sound are working, suspend works - looks like it's all set.
The fonts are not looking so great, let me see I can do something about that. Followed the instructions from the Ubuntu Blog and installed windows fonts, also enabled anti-aliasing, looking decent now.
The interesting part will be how my parents fare in using it. I'll post updates.