thought you guys might like this. just a fun story, no big news here:
http://designedforlearning.wordpress.com/2008/12/23/my-new-sysadmin/
my new sysadmin
I have a new Laptop. Its a work laptop, so it came with XP. I actually paid £25 quid to NOT have Vista, just because I didn't have the time to figure out how I can transfer the XP licence from the old one. But anyway. I had to set it up. You know, install FireFox, download ubuntu, make it a decent machine.
Luckily its Christmas holiday, and I needed something to keep my kid busy (he's 12). So I asked him if he wants the job. Of course he did. So yesterday he speant some time fiddling with the XP. There's some proqota.exe thingy that won't let us shut down the machine unless we ctrl+alt+del to the task manager and turn it off. Someone at IT must have put some funny disk quota on my account, and I can't figure out how to kill it. Never mind.
Today we decided he's done about as much as can do for the XP, and its time to install Ubuntu. I told him: go to the Ubuntu site, download the installer, burn it to a CD and install. Then set admin accounts for you and me, and a regular user for your little sister (I mean, she is 8 years old).
and he did.
- 11:30 begin download, do the dishes
- 11:45 download complete. begin disk burn, read some comics
- 12:00 CD ready. reboot - oops, windows. need to change the boot sequence (I helped with that)
- 12:05 installation begins, he asks me if its ok to go with the default (leave 15% for XP), I say yes. That's the last question he asks
- 12:20 he calls me over to key in the password for my new account
- 12:30 installs a few games, tests his favorite sites, installs flash plugin & java. I show him the updates notification icon and what to do about it
- 13:00 we go out for lunch, he leaves the software update thingy running
- 15:00 back from lunch, a friend comes over. a bit of a disappointment as runescape doesn't run. He tries all the standard procedures, but apparently runescape is sending him to the wrong download page. Eventually I have to give a hand, but in 5 minutes we're sorted and happy (and friend is impressed)
Not bad, for his first day on the job.
___________________________
Yishay Mor, Researcher, London Knowledge Lab
http://www.lkl.ac.uk/people/mor.html
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