The conference on Technological Surveillance and Free Software

Yesterday I attended a conference titled "Technological Surveillance and Free Software", which was organized by the School of Information Technologies of the university where I work. This activity was part of the actions to start the migration to FLOSS in the university.

The speaker showed a clip from one newspaper displaying the headline "State institutions using more free software everyday". This piece of news was published yesterday, too. That was something I did not expect!

Then, the content of the talk became more IT jargon. However, although the conference targeted professionals of librarianship and ITs, the speaker shared some interesting tools that many people can benefit from, especially those who work writing articles: Sironta and Zotero. While the former is a program for collaborating on documents, the latter is an extension for Firefox that helps you retrieve the bibliographical entry of online books, a great tool for scholars and researchers.

It's fun that I got the information about the event from my mother, a non-technical computer user who, some years ago, used to drive me nuts with desperate calls concerning crashes and viruses. Today, she is a happy Pardus user and sends me all the information that she gets about free software events in my country.

About Mothers and Linux

I read constantly that "Linux is not ready for Mom" but I cannot help ask myself which distribution....or, to be more specific, which mother.

Three days ago, we celebrated Mother's Day in my country. Thus, my brother and I wanted to surprise our mother and my wife (who recently became the mother of a cute baby girl). We wanted to give them a memorable present, something that they could use both for entertainment and, why not, to learn. In an unplanned visit to a computer store, my eyes fixed upon the classic Asus Eee PC 900, the tiny netbook that drew me to the world of Linux with its version of Xandros. Next to it sat the Asus Eee PC 901. Temptation was formidable, so we ended up buying both despite the clerk never quite understood why we rejected his offer of some other netbooks (preloaded with the rip off known as Windows 7 Starter).

For those who might think that those were inappropriate gifts because a mother simply can't use Linux, let me asure them my mother is a happy user of Pardus Linux while my wife, who bought a laptop two years ago, asked me to install Mandriva 2010 not to have to use, or suffer, should I say, Windows Vista.

As soon as my mother saw her present, she became truly happy because she wanted a netbook to be able to check her email and socialize with her virtual friends in Facebook without being stuck in front of her desktop PC. However, she rejected the preloaded OS. Before Ballmer celebrates, let me clarify that she did not ask for Windows. She wanted Pardus 2011 instead of Xandros! By the way, this Asus Eee PC runs it with full effects without a glitch despite its modest 1 GB RAM and 20 GB storage.

On the other hand, when my wife saw her Eee PC 901, she decided to give the extinct Xandros an opportunity, mainly due to its flawless voice command. Yes, a tiny computer like than one can receive voice commands even better than the Eee PC 900 did. Windows 7 Starter, you should be ashamed of yourself!

So, there you go: that's two mothers who are happy with Linux.

Don't give Linux to your mother

I'd like to give an honest piece of advice to those who are concerned about their parents and their computer skills. Whatever you do, don't give Linux to your parents. Yes, I know that sometimes their constant calls for help regarding security breeches,crashes, and virus infections might make you feel tempted to install one Linux distribution on their computer...but be strong and don't give in!

Of course, many readers might be expecting (if not demanding!) an explanation for my position. Well, let me spare you all the boring reasoning; instead of that, I am going to give you an illustration in the form of an anecdote which I believe will suffice.

My fifty-something mother, who had never used a computer until three years ago, took a course on Windows and MS Office and, as she grew confident with her new skills, she bought herself a nice computer. However, despite all the time and money invested on her courses, she could not advance in her computer usage because she would constantly get the familiar error screens that Windows gives to those who trust Microsoft, not to mention the common virus infections that made the machine act funny. It goes without saying that the episodes would normally end with her justified frustration ("I did not cover any of this in the course!") and our visit to her house to fix the problem...time and again.

Then my brother got truly fed up and installed Pardus Linux (Anthropoides Virgo, I think) onto her hard disk in 2010. The reaction was instantaneous: after a minor resistance on her part, the calls concerning computer problems dropped to almost zero. One of her last calls was to tell me that she was proud because she had been able to burn an MP3 CD using K3b. I felt really happy for her because she had terrible problems trying to do the same in Nero.

But here comes the most remarkable thing: since viruses were no longer a problem, she got an ASDL connection to the Internet last January 10. Everything went off quite nicely until two weeks ago. We got a phone call: something had happened to the modem and she could not log in. It turned out that it was an ISP problem, so they sent a technician to solve the situation and...the guy had never seen Pardus Linux! He was extremely surprised because a woman her age was using Linux, an OS that is supposed to be horribly hard to use.

My mother told me that the technician spent some extra time trying to configure the modem, but he succeeded and went away proud because he could...(wasn't Linux impossible to use?)

When I saw the computer, the guy had messed up with Plasma and deleted some applications from the lower panel, too; he also threw the desktop icons to the garbage bin and resized the screen size. To sum up, "no puppet kept its head", as written in the Quixote.

Returning the computer to its normal state was a matter of 15 minutes and my mother said "It's because Linux is easy". Well, she is right. In fact, Pardus 2011 is even more user-friendly. So is SimplyMepis. And Mandriva 2010.2 is easy too, according to this article.

Therefore, do not give Linux to your mother or father. They might end up loving it, learning what they never could and, worst of all, putting an unsuspecting technician accustomed to Windows to shame.