My colleague, John, and I work for the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Our responsibility is to maintain departmental analytical instruments.
One day, John told me that he had an old computer, and was interested in putting it to some use - but was undecided. I suggested Ubuntu.
The machine is a 500MHz Celeron. It had 128M of RAM, so I installed an additional 128M. Fortunately, I had a couple of 64M DIMMs lying around. The graphics card was troublesome, so out it came and I plugged in a spare. I couldn't say what card it was; all I know is that it worked.
I started the installation by running Hardy Heron Live. After satisfying myself that all was working, and after partitioning manually, I started the installation.
Being on the old side, the machine was slower than what we are accustomed to, so I left it to complete the installation.
At UCT we are fortunate to have the whole Ubuntu repository available on the intranet. The advantage is that 1Mbit download rates are possible. Internet access, on the other hand, is around 3 to 10k bits per second.
All I had to do was point the machine to the Ubuntu repository by changing sources.list appropriately. Then I started the update manager and followed that with installation of programs not included on the Ubuntu CD.
The result of all this work was a very happy John. I showed him what the machine could do, and we compared it with the time when that other operating system was installed. He was so keen to try it out that the photograph shows him trying it out before I had time to replace the cover.
He is interested in Scribus, Qcad, Open Office, and some games.
John is now a satisfied user of Ubuntu. He has managed the transition from that other operating system to Ubuntu with ease.
