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[Wolfgang S. Rupprecht]

Mike  <mike.cloaked at gmail.com> writes:
> In my case the number of admin visits via vnc was initially every day
> and sometimes more often - and only slowly diminished over a period of months
> to reach a level of 1 or two vnc connections to fix things per week... and
> around a year before being confident that no visit was needed within any 
> two week period.

Thanks for reminding me about VNC.  I gave it a spin yesterday between
two of my computers and it worked well enough on the local ethernet.
I'm a bit worried about the bandwidth and CPU required though.  The
remote cpu is a ~2ghz sempron (aka, low end amd/64) and was pegged at
70% cpu utilization and 200kbits/sec average bandwidth outgoing.  I
wonder if vinagre(1) has a fall back when it notices a lot of dropped
packets.  I don't think her DSL is all that fast. 

I need to drive down to her house before I can do an over the net
test.  No way am I going to be able to talk her through to
System->Preferences->Internet and Networking->Remote Desktop and
configure the several things there without messing up other stuff.

> Anyway - I do wonder how many other people have provided a linux system for
> an elderly relative to give them communication with friends and family? 
> Might be interesting to know if this is widespread or rare!

This is a first for me.  My biggest problem is I simply can't imagine
what her problem is.  She'll poke at every underlined thing on the
gmail web page frantically and type users names at the google search
bar and wonder why "sending mail doesn't work again."  There are quite
a few highly creative ways to fail and I think I've now seen a large
number of them.  I wish I could simply the interface for her.  That
would at least give her a fighting chance when she poked at things at
random.

-wolfgang
-- 
Wolfgang S. Rupprecht              http://www.full-steam.org/  (ipv6-only)
         You may need to config 6to4 to see the above pages.