Last week on Dec 26 we had the yearly family admin day and a day later 39C3 (the 39th Computer Chao Congress) started. I usually try to watch interesting talks about security, reverse engineering and hardware. Most if not all I wanted to join are available as recordings and I will add a list of the ones I enjoyed most.

While watching the talk about the End-of-10 campaign (I have met Joseph at Akademy 2024 in person) I was reminded at one spot to my job as family admin. When the presenters referred to the administration of a Linux system compared to a Windows one. I got reminded of chats with folks in my town who talked about “re-installing Windows” a few times during the year because something was broken. I don’t remember when I last re-installed one of the family computers.

Bringing Linux closer to the family already started many years ago. I started out using Linux already in the last millennium. My wife at the time used a Windows 2000 system. At some point (seems to be usual for Windows systems) I needed to install a fresh system. That was the time, when I installed OpenOffice and told my wife that this is the word processor to be used in the future. Of course, she asked why I hadn’t installed the MS Suite, but when you tell someone with legal training that we don’t have a license, that answers the question without further inquiry. So it was Windows 2000 with OpenOffice as word processro and spreadsheet program and Pegasus Mail as mail reader.

At some point the hard drive of this computer broke and I was lucky to be able to rescue the most important files off of it. Because I did not have a replacement drive at hand, I simply setup a TFTP bootable Linux system keeping all the files on the network drive on the Linux server in my house. This allowed me to use the same box but without a hard drive. So this hard drive crash in the early 2000s allowed me to introduce my wife to Linux.

When my kids got into the age to go to grammar school, they have seen me working on the computer during our summer vacation and also wanted to play with it. Since I did not have games with me, I installed KTouch, a typewriter trainer for learning to touch type for them. They had a lot of fun and actually learned how to touch type in the following weeks.

Later on, when they got their own computers, it was clear to install a Linux system, because they were already used to it. They liked writing stories of all kinds and used LibreOffice for it. I had a few arguments with teachers at their school why we don’t have the usual widespread tools. I remember one time though, when my daughter came home and reported, that they now have new white boards at school. Due to German bureaucracy, the hardware was financed but the money for application software licenses (beyond the operating system) was not included in the budget. So one of the teachers simply installed free software like the OpenOffice suite and the problem was solved. Well, only to some extent, because the other teachers did not know how to operate this software. This was the time, when my daughter – out of the sudden – gained a big advantage.

Later, she enrolled in university to study computer science and bought herself a new computer. A Samsung Book 2 with a pre-installed operating system (guess which one). She was playing around with it for some time when she came to me and said “Daddy, please install some real software on it. I can’t use it the way it is”. I had a bit of a hard time to find the right Linux distro which already supported it at the time but we got it working. And she was more than happy when we ported all the data from her old laptop over. Today, five years later, she is still using it after a few updates of the operating system. Oh, 3 months after she enrolled, she withdrew again to start a career as paramedic.

My mom on the other hand, uses Linux also for more than 15 years now. At one point, she told me that she needs a new computer and asked if I could provide support for it. I told her, that I would only provide support if we will install Linux on the computer. At first, she was a bit scared, but today she is happy that I can provide even remote support from the other end of the world and that things are simply working.

All in all, coming back to the End-of-10 campaign, I see that I am not affected by all of this. All – well most of all – of my family members are already using Linux for a long time. Of course I made sure to install KDE as the desktop environment and that they have KMyMoney to maintain their finances 😉

Thanks for reading until here. The post got longer than expected. And since I promised to leave links to the 39C3 talks (and one each from 37C3 and 38C3 which need to be watched in series) here they come:

37C3

38C3

39C3

My “job” as family admin or Linux rules the house