Relationship Stress Test...Here Honey, Try This...

Those closest to me know that I have a new...let's see, what is the politically correct noun...ah yes.

Significant.

I have a new Significant.

My Significant's name is Diane.

So girl friend, "GF", live-in...it's all the same.




We're under one roof and no one has been beaten, stabbed or shot as of yet.

So far so good.

So here I go trying to screw up a good thing.  We are a one computer household and dual-boot does not exist here.

We use Linux.

Now, Diane is well aware of the problems that Windows Users face.  She's been one of them for as long as she's been using a computer but once she sat in proximity to a Linux computer and someone who knew how to use it, that all changed.

Diane is retired from the Airline Industry.  She spent years in the Accounting and Purchasing Divisions of several airlines and companies so she's no stranger to spreadsheets and databases.  In the last part of her career she also used many on line applications to do her work.

So she is painfully aware of viruses and the nasties that come with the use of MS browsers.

And she is sick of them.

Diane now spends some of her free time doing contract work for a friend who is in real estate.   She takes on work to do postings through Smart Apartment Data and part of her duty is to post Chamber of Commerce-type pictures of apartment complexes.  To do that she must first download the pictures, organize them in folders on her computer then write corresponding text for each picture.

I mean it goes deeper than that but this is the part she has to do before she can do anything else.

In the past, she has used a Windows XP machine to get this done. She is painfully aware of how user-unfriendly Windows Explorer can be...especially when she is dealing with hundreds of pictures to be renamed, sorted and moved to different folders.

And yeah, there are third-party apps...but that only adds to the time and expense.

She used to dread getting a call for contract work.

Last week, we got the XP machine files transferred to the computer and I sat down with her to show her how the Linux file system works.

***hint...if you are in a troubled or stressed relationship, this might not be the time to do this....I'm just sayin...

For reference, I am running our version of Linux Mint (HeliOS) with a dual core AMD Opteron 1.7 gig processor overclocked to 2.5, Nvidia Graphics with the 185 driver, the PAE version of the latest kernel with 4 gigs of ram.

Sufficient for our needs I would say.

So I pull up a chair beside her and cracked open Nautilus to get to work.  For the sake of a new Linux User, I left the button navigation bar in tact just as a set of training wheels.  Visual location of the open folder has proven to help the learning process in my experience.



The Linux file system seems to be the intermediate stumbling block to many new Linux Users...not because it is difficult but because it is foreign to them.  It didn't take long for her to grasp the concept of "home folder" and those folders within.  She created the folders she needed via context menu or keyboard shortcuts and got to work.

It wasn't three minutes into her task that she laughed softly.

"I can't believe I struggled so hard to do this in Windows."

Of course, I had earlier added the "copy to" and "move to" scripts in Nautilus...I use them extensively but she used those or the drag and drop method, depending on her need.

It took her a grand total of five minutes to grasp and utilize the file system in Gnome.

Diane isn't "computer savvy" by any stretch of anyone's imagination.

Sure...I fully realize this can all be done simply from the command line...but it won't happen any time soon.

What...you trying to get me killed?

All-Righty Then