Hi,

I am mainly a Windows user (work). Geek in Windows, zero knowledge in Linux. Fell into the Linux trap by accident 1.5 years ago. Daughter, 14 years old, asked to replace Windows XP of her computer by Ubuntu, out of a challenge made with a geekier friend (she didn't know how to make a CD from a downloaded file).

A few months later, she got comfortable with Ubuntu and I realized I no longer need to do the monthly crap clean up of her computer that I always used to do. The geek in me got puzzled. In January 2009, our company got hurt badly by the Conflicker virus, although I was among the survivals, I was outraged that some worms can have a say in my computer without my consent. I then decided to check out the security reputation of that Linux guy.

Testing Ubuntu 8.04 in VM, then installed for real in double boot on Vista machine, then reformated again with Ubuntu 9.04 as single OS. Needless to say, I was more than convinced by Linux. During all that time, I terrorized many people with my novice questions. Even decided dictatorially to reformat my wife's computer to Ubuntu, in spite of the victim's vehement protestations, kicking and screaming. After a while, the victim has resigned to Linux conditions, made efforts to adapt and now seems to appreciate the fact that the computer is no longer under attack from the innocent Internet browsing and got bloated by mysterious craps.

We were 100% Linux at home for a few months, until my wife complained that she could not convert all her MS Office docs into OpenOffice and also that would also create some incompatibilities when exchanging docs with her colleagues. Then I came up with another twist, creating a Virtualbox VM on her Ubuntu machine to run WinXP. This XP VM will not be able to access the Internet. I cut the Internet by a double security (blocking the MAC address of the VM in the router and using a static local IP with a blank default gateway in WinXP network settings). BTW, WinXP with no connection to the Internet is quite an awesome OS. Fast, low resource, 100% secure, even look very nice if you use custom Visual Style with a patched uxtheme.dll.

We also have a poor computer at home used as"Internet Cafe" in the kitchen area. It's a Pentium 3, 1 Ghz, 768 MB Ram. My green sensibilities keep me from replacing it. This poor P3 run CPU fan less, pretty quiet. It can surf the Internet consuming only 25 W, this is a luxury not everybody can reach nowadays. But this P3 is notoriously slow, I used it as guinea pig for testing distros. Ubuntu, Mint, Xubuntu. All look nice but still slow.

Now that I find my way little bit around the Linux jargon, I have enough courage to jump out of the Ubuntu universe, testing Debian. Then in the forum Debian, someone mentioned AntiX. I gave it a tried and am pretty impressed. I have to congratulate anticapilista for packing that much features in such a small and responsive distro. I wish he picked LXDE as Desktop environment, the GUI is better and is as light as IceWM.

Thank you for creating AntiX and thank you for the forum.

You can install LXDE through (menu) > System > Metainstaller
Then at the login window, press F1 to choose it.

Since it would have been installed separated you will have to configure this and that so it will be well integrated in antiX.

As you did with xfce, you can make it the default environment to boot by editing ~/.xinitrc

You might need to install lxde via apt in a terminal or synaptic as I think installing via the meta-installer will fail. (It complains about dependency problems).

Glad you appreciate the work we are doing here to offer a light but fully featured and flexible Debian-based distro.

Great story Dynamo!

Lots of detail and stuff I can relate to.

Your daughter did you a favor and didn't even know it __{{emoticon}}__ That's the beauty of youth ..blowing past your comfort zone. I've been away from windows enough now that I'm leary of it. I kept viruses and crap out of my wifes old xp laptop by making sure she didn't surf with admin rights. Don't know if that works on the new ones.

fendermon wrote:Your daughter did you a favor and didn't even know it __{{emoticon}}__ That's the beauty of youth ..blowing past your comfort zone. I've been away from windows enough now that I'm leary of it. I kept viruses and crap out of my wifes old xp laptop by making sure she didn't surf with admin rights. Don't know if that works on the new ones.

Glad you like the introduction. My daughter's case is also the counter-example of the myth of Linux unfriendliness. It is really possible to use Linux without any prior IT knowledge.

So your wife is still using Windows XP on her laptop or AntiX?

She is still on xp. Her comfort zone is pretty narrow, and she also needs full compatibilty with Micro$oft everything for work. At least Firefox is her browser. Baby steps..ya know. Even at the large IT dept. I work people can't imagine straying from the norm.