Wed 4 Apr 2007
My Twin Sister – “This Fedora thing is easy”
Posted by J5 under Fedora , Gnome , Linux , Redhat , usability[7] Comments
My sister was up this week, taking a break from the upper east side of Manhattan to visit her bro and attend a business seminar. She didn’t bring her laptop so she ended up using mine while she was here. Her basic usage is Firefox, AOL web mail, Exchange web mail for work, a word processor and a spreadsheet. It helped that she uses Firefox on windows but she really liked how easy it was to do what she wanted. When she downloaded a spreadsheet from her work mail and launched it, it brought up open office. She was able to view all the web pages she normally goes to and she found everything quickly without asking my help.
I’m setting up one of my older laptops for her – a Fujitsu Lifebook which is really slow but is small and good enough for her to take to her MBA class. “Do I have to worry about viruses because I think my Laptop has one?” Nope.
About the only thing she found really irritating was the synaptics touchpad. When are we going to fix that? I mean the scroll functionality is fairly useful and doesn’t get annoying if it screws up but the browser back gesture is just wrong. Is there anyone who seriously uses this feature?
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April 4th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
For the scroll issue:
- Go to about:config
- Set mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action to 0
- Set mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.sysnumlines
to true
That should fix it.
April 5th, 2007 at 4:02 am
I use the back gesture all the time on touchpads, actually. This doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a good idea, but it isn’t all that unpopular.
– Chris
April 5th, 2007 at 4:16 am
How did she get on with Exchange Web Access in Firefox? I always find my work’s site delivers a broken version of OWA to anything but IE
April 5th, 2007 at 9:33 am
I use the gsynaptics package to tweak the touchpad settings. There are a few more features than you might expect in there and also easily fixes that bug.
April 5th, 2007 at 11:15 am
Jon,
Not sure. It just worked for her.
Christer,
Ya options
Would rather have had it turned off and people who care could turn it on. It is just that for new users it could color their opinions of Linux fast.
April 5th, 2007 at 1:18 pm
I got the impression that the browser back behavior is mapped so because some mice have extra buttons that map to the same button numbers as horizontal scrolling produces.
What irritates me most is that after you fiddle with about:config to get horizontal scrolling, Mozilla scrolls in the opposite direction from every other application.
April 5th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
Yeah, I actually do use that mouse scrolling thing to go back in firefox.
I figured it out by accident, so I adapted to start using it, not vice versa