Wife wants eye-candy like a flashy desktop, maybe with animated desktop

PS: I can't handle high-contrast viewing (my eyes) so whatever exists should be easy for me to handle and still be very flashy for my wife to enjoy.

(I wonder why computers MUST be such a silly source of entertainment, really....personally I find it to be a bit of nonsense, but she's my wife! That's life, eh!)

Another PS: My wife insists on Desktop Drapes because it displays family photos from her younger days, so the desktop pattern can't change.

I know, what a conundrum!

Desktop Drapes is available in Ubuntu, under System-Administration-Synaptic Package Manager, though I haven't used it. As for a little flash on the desktop, you get some cool effects by changing the visual effects under System-Preferences-Appearance-Visual Effects, check "Extra". By using 2 different accounts, you will be able to completely set up the computer and displays separately for each account.

Yea, separate accounts wouldn't work, she's be just as uncomfortable with that as I'd be.

I realize it's a stupid conundrum, just figured I'd ask.

I did burn some other Live CDs this evening for my father-in-law to see tomorrow - OpenSuse, Linux Mint, Austrumi Linux (very nice, too bad a lot of it isn't in English), gnewsense Linux, Crunchbang Linux. The one my wife liked a lot was Austrumi Linux running Xfce.

Anyway I'll mark this as Problem Solved.....but the real problem is how people come to need so much entertainment...I'm so busy working that my work is my entertainment. Sad how a culture comes to this. Oh well, thanks!

Having separate Users is brilliantly easy on linux compared with trying to sort that sort of thing in Windows or even Mac. It doesn't waste any space and still allows both users full access to all the same programs and stuff. It's also quite easy to make sure you can share all the same folders and data. But it does give you each a little private(ish) space and personal settings, such as excessive eye-candy for one and dbu for the other ;)

I think it's always worth starting people off with a dual-boot
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WindowsDualBoot
It's easy to add anti-virus scanner that can scan the Windows side to remove infected files. This is much more effective than trying to run a virus scan inside the OS you think is infected. Of course using the anti-virus scan to scan a linux reminds me of the man spreading anti-elephant powder in the snow-drifts around Putney. lol. But it is handy to be able to scan the Windows side ;)

Hope this helps but i've a feeling you've probably just gone and converted someone to Linux without the easy gentle migration of using a dual-boot system lol
Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

Yea, I ended up installing Ubuntu on my FIL's laptop. I tried a few other distributions but found that Ubuntu did what I needed it to do.

I did try OpenSuse but found that the laptop (Celeron 3, 1gig RAM) really didn't have enough horsepower to pull it off.

Lol, that's odd. Usually Ubuntu is the more heavily bloated (=fully featured) distro. Are you using the latest 9.04? I've heard it's much more efficient then 7.10, 8.04 or 8.10 but that's the first time i've heard such strong evidence of that :) It's good to hear, thanks :)
Regards from
Tom :)

I haven't received 9.04 on CD yet, but I've placed my order.

I've set up 8.04 on his laptop because it's his laptop is a few years old and I remember having difficulties on few-years-older-computers with trying to install/run 8.10 (graphics issues).

I know 8.04 works on machines that are a few years older so I trusted that.

I'll go back today to finish the job, I've yet to get it to recognize his CX7800 scanner but I've found instructions on how to remedy this.

Thanks!

Glad to hear it's going well :)
On PII's and often PIII's too i find a different much lighter distro works better. I tend to prefer Wolvix Hunter for those
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=wolvix
or perhaps for even smaller ram and older hardware sliTaz or TinyCore
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=slitaz
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=tinycore

Good luck and have fun :)
Regards from
Tom :)

Hmmm...what a torturous weekend!

My FIL's laptop is the first I've seen to have problems with running Linux, tending to freeze up randomly. I never saw that happen before!

I ended up putting Windoze back unfortunately, but not after trying several other distros of Linux, also a few different versions of Ubuntu.

7.04 wouldn't let it freeze - but I couldn't set up wireless internet, it seems the repositories for 7.04 (I needed ndiswrapper) were unavailable over the weekend and I couldn't find ndiswrapper on the install CD (package manager couldn't find it).

Oh well!

Hmmm...what a torturous weekend!

My FIL's laptop is the first I've seen to have problems with running Linux, tending to freeze up randomly. I never saw that happen before!

I ended up putting Windoze back unfortunately, but not after trying several other distros of Linux, also a few different versions of Ubuntu.

7.04 wouldn't let it freeze - but I couldn't set up wireless internet, it seems the repositories for 7.04 (I needed ndiswrapper) were unavailable over the weekend and I couldn't find ndiswrapper on the install CD (package manager couldn't find it).

Oh well!

Sorry for the double comments, the network is extremely sluggish this day!

LaunchPad has been having trouble too over the past week or so, it could have been that. Anyone would think some major new release had just happened ;) heheheh

9.04 or 8.04 are definitely the ones to go for, any older ones are just going to cause problems now, please don't install 7.04 or even 7.10 anymore. As you were saying 9.04 seems to be much lighter on resources than earlier releases and this has been a major focus for this release. It might be worth trying the 9.04 netbook remix and/or Xubuntu on laptop type machines, even though it's aimed more at smaller screens and specifically at netbooks. If *buntu doesn't work then it's worth trying a non-debian based distro and preferably a tiny distro, i would recommend Wolvix - this might help identify what needs to be done to get *buntu working well on the machine. There are also some guidance pages for helping with unusual architectures
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CategoryInstallation

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

PS it seems you are doing some great work out there, nice one :)