“The kernel was rebuilt with a couple of patches, to provide a
smoother and quicker desktop experience. Then the sound, printer,
and Nvidia drivers were set up and installed. Additionally, the
squid caching web proxy was installed and set up to block Internet
ads. It seems that Mike and Diane were quite sick of the Internet
ads which had appeared while they were surfing the Internet on the
WebTV. Squid was installed to solve this problem. I then created
three new user accounts, all with the same password, so that she
could later change the passwords herself. I did minimal setup on
these user accounts, hoping that she would opt to do them herself
later, which would help familiarize her with how the Gnome desktop
worked. The computer was now set up with a pre-loaded operating
system, as far as Mike and Diane were concerned.“Mike had just returned home from work as the system
configuration was completed. He had not seen the computer in
operation yet and wished to see it. The Mozilla web browser was
opened, and each of the ten links on the Mozilla toolbar was hit in
quick succession. His jaw hit the floor as the pages appeared
almost instantaneously, thanks to the squid proxy and the cable
modem.“It was then that Mike asked me about an email problem he had
previously, while using WebTV. Mike daily received large amounts of
spam in his email, using WebTV. He wished to know if there was
anything he could do to control it using Debian. I told him he
could bounce (roughly translated as returning the spam to the
sender with his address marked as non-existent) the spam, or he
could filter it directly to the trash, depending on which email
program he wished to use…”
Related Story:
OSNews:
Total Computer Newbies Meet Debian: Part 1, The Install(Apr 08,
2003)