Here's the deal. I have given one of my older PCs to my gf for her to use in college. Before handing it over to her I installed slackware 8.1 and modified the gnome desktop to use windows icons (IE icon for mozilla, Word icon for openoffice, etc). She is now such a linux advocate she is trying to convert her parents. Keep in mind she's not a geek at all. She doesn't even play games 'cause they give her a headache. So I'm really happy that she found it so easy to use.

Now my sister who is going to college 5 hours from me wants me to rebuild her machine. (Much to her surprise as she does not know she will be getting a linux box back). Keep in mind that she has NEVER seen, used, or heard of linux. Plus she will be 5 hours away so if she has problems we're doing over the phone support 'cause I'm not driving down there.

I wanted to poll the community. I was thinking of giving my sister either a modified Slackbox (like I did with the gf) or maybe I would give her Lycoris and make some changes to it. What suggestions does anyone have to make this transition and this pc as pain free and as stable as possible?

ie what apps should I install, best approach for hands-off transitions, etc.

tia,
jpbarto

SuSE is great for the desktop, I prefer Redhat, but it is a little advanced, but very easy to use. RH9 looks very pretty as well.

My favorite personally is Mandrake, VERY easy to use.

However, if YOU are going to be doing PHONE support, my advice to you is to make sure that whatever you put on her machine is familiar to YOU. There's nothing worse than doing phone support when you can't figure out what's on her screen because you have something different.

That said, isn't your sister going to be pissed if you slap linux on without telling her? Unless she doesn't know windows either and isn't expecting it.

My GF has an old crappy 133 that is not working, so she asked me for a new machine. I told her she could have my old P3 933 with Redhat 9 on it. So I did the whole explaination of Linux, and she sounded excited.

Yes my sister may be pissed but I think it will be hilarious. Plus she has no HD so she's getting an OS reinstall either way. I figure if I install Linux, tweak a button here an there, maybe give her a quick 15 minute crash course (ie, here's your web browser, here's how to turn it off, etc) I think she'll be ok. I think she'll probably take to it much like my gf did.

what sold my gf was playing frozen-bubble on my PC

Mandrake 9.1, very easy to use....

games! good idea... almost forgot about games. I had humored the idea of installing Quake III even though I know she'd never play it (kinda like a trademark). frozen bubble is probably a much better idea though.