I have been looking at 11.04 with the view to converting my partner to using it in future. One major problem until now has been that as a registered blind person she has trouble viewing text and icons and some of microsofts aids leave a lot to be desired.
I like the way that opening up the Applications displays as Icons of a reasonable size. I have yet to double check Assistive Technologies to see what is on offer.
My thoughts are to totally remove anything that she will not use from all the menu listings so that when she opens up the Applications everything will be displayed against the Most Frequently Used section. Once everything has been set that she is happy with I would then wish to then install the finished product on to her system as a dual boot.
Before I completely waste my time removing items from the Software Centre will I be able to achieve my aims and how would I do so?
It is possible to export your package markings from within Synaptic… then import them into another machine if that’s what you mean.
That should ensure you have the same software installed.
You’d have to make sure your repository lists matched.
For “desktop” settings… If you’ve set up a second account with her name on your system, and got that account the way you want it… I suppose you could just copy the contents of the “Home” folder (including hidden files) to the new machine.
BUT
You’d have to make sure the 2 accounts both have the same UID number… accounts aren’t based on ‘username’, but on the UID… the first user account created will have a UID of 1000, the second 1001, etc.
UID’s can be seen and/or changed, in the advanced section of “Users & Groups”
I’ve never tried this, but can’t really see a problem.
That said, I’m unsure exactly how much time/effort it would save you… particularly if you run into a problem.
From what you were saying it looks very much like patience is a virtue. Put the OS on to her machine then chop and change to suit.
I was thinking more on the lines that I first set everything up to what should suit her needs and copy it over as an install. I currently don’t want to load Natty on to my working system as I am afraid to creating problems for myself.
Will leave this for a bit more research and see what develops.
Again thanks for your input
Well technically there would be nothing stopping you just creating a giant tarball, of everything in / but you’de still have to use something like gparted to make sure there was enough room to take it all on her Windows drive… and you’d still have to manually create the partitions… and manually install GRUB
Clonezilla would allow you to back up the partitions to file, and would restore them to unpartitioned space on the Windows drive, but you’d still have to manually create that unpartitioned space, and install GRUB.
I’m just not sure you’d really save yourself much time/effort… particularly if you encounter a problem.
Probably best to just use Gparted to resize the Windows partition, install Ubuntu to the rest, then take your time getting it right.
Or do you mean putting Ubuntu on a seperate (external) drive ?.. this would be entirely possible.
From what you are saying no matter what I do I have a load of work ahead. I intend to buy a new laptop and once that has been done I was thinking that I would then experiment with 11.04 and/or 11.10 to see if I can get things to suit my partner.
If that works and is acceptable then I will see how exactly I will approach a dual boot on her system.
Many thanks for your guidance