Delivered Zorin Core on a 2nd hand laptop to mum today :)

Just keeping this thread alive so i don't forget.

1 month in and so far so good. There were a couple of tweaks i had to do for her, which i asked/commented about elsewhere on the forum.

Except, the printer drivers refused to work on her laptop when they worked fine on mine (also running Zorin). Baffled, but the ootb drivers work well enough for printing. It just lacks the maintenance options.

I got my son a new (2nd hand) PC last weekend and we're going to try Zorin on it. TBH, i'm not so sure about Zorin for a 'gaming rig' (in part), but we'll give it a ago.

I set up Zorin on my dad's PC on the weekend. He's 80+. He took to it pretty well. I'll see how he goes over the coming weeks. He uses his PC a lot more than mum uses her laptop.

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If you can even get an 80 year old to use a computer without defiance, that alone is half the battle. If he ends up actually loving Zorin OS as well, thats a Christmas miracle. lol


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Heh. He can't even copy/paste. I've shown him a dozen times. But, he can email and use a search engine. So far i've not had a single word from him. No problems at all.

Is it weird that I want to help my parents run Zorin on an old laptop but none of them actually need any computers? :sob: Like Gen-Z, both of them are glued to their mobile screens. :unamused:

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haha, half your luck! To be fair, my dad has been FAR less work than my mum. She's fussy. But dad barely noticed the difference.

Does the internet look the same? Yes dad.
Does my email look the same? Yes dad.

Sold.

The only issue i've had with him so far is false positives with ClamAV thanks to a single stupid business that insists on linking with text as "company a", while the url is "company b". So ClamAV thinks it's a phishing attempt. I've tried to set an exclusion on the specific file, but i haven't been able to figure it out yet. They're important emails for him to keep for about a month. So sadly i can't just set them to auto-delete.

So anyway, i'm confident that my parents will stick with Zorin. So i'll make a payment when i return to work and make some money again. I donated some money to KDE in December. And Ukraine.. i still help out there with bits here and there.

My kids haven't had much time to dip into Zorin yet. My son's basic setup is done. He plays most of his games on Zorin now. He'll try it there before going to Windows if it doesn't work, or works poorly. Good on him. I haven't had time to sit with my daughter on her "new" (2nd hand) PC yet. But Zorin is installed.

Wifey even asked about it recently, because Windows keeps irritating her. So who knows!

That is great news, the more folks leaving Windows, and going to Linux, the better. False positives with ClamAV can be a thing, there really isn't a real quality anti-virus app solution on Linux, that I really like.

The reason for this, ( I think ) is because over the past decades, Linux hasn't had issues with virus's or malware, because they weren't written for Linux, they were written to target Windows users, as that is where the market is.

Having said that, over the past 5 years, its becoming known that virus's are being made to target Linux users now, so its irresponsible to operate Linux, without an anti-virus solution. Still though, the chances of getting a virus are low.

I've gotten a virus or malware from installing Windows software in Wine before, but here's the beautiful thing, again, those virus's were coded for Windows users, and can't do anything to a Linux system in a Wine bottle.

Now, there used to be Eset nod32 or whatever it was called for the Linux desktop. However, by the time I learned of this, they had already discontinued their GUI desktop solution, due to low marketshare and usage, and thereby focused on their terminal only server solution.

But as it is, ClamAV is really the only solution that we have, but hey, at least its free! Have you looked into the prices that top shelf anti-virus APPs are costing people yearly? Its getting really insane now days. At least most apps on Linux are free, so there's that.


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The only false negative i'm getting with ClamAV seems to be an email my dad gets from his bank. I can't figure out how to exclude it.

The email, stupidly says "bankx dot com" but the url goes to "iamthebankx dot com" type thing - so ClamAV thinks it's a possible phishing attempt. Cool that it works, but as i say, i can't figure out how to exclude that result.

Anyway, i came back to donate - but the only way appears to be PayPal :frowning: I do not use PayPal.

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You can pay by debit or credit card, not just PayPal:

With regard your printer issue, have you tried installing 'printer-driver-all' from Synaptic? I've only just picked up on this via PCLOS Debian forum.

In terms of maintenance, what is the printer concerned?

Notice that my printer states the printer is driverless, but aftewards points to the cups driver.

What is good about printer-driver-all is that as well as installing cups it also installs Gutenprint which has all the up-to-date drivers. I have a Canon Pixma TS-8151, so the driver used is TS8000 series.

In terms of maintenance, there are only two GNU/Linux apps available, one for Epson (escputil) and HP (HP-LIP) - the latter uses command line tools for maintenance.

My All-in-One Canon printer has an LCD panel for maintenance. Ink levels only show up once a printer is installed and a Test Page run off:

You can report false positives to Clam-AV.

Yep, their Epson has the panel too - and after i failed to get he official printer apps to work i had a look and asked them to use the panel for the printer clean and alignment functions. I'll have a look at that package next time i visit them, thanks :slight_smile:

The donate still operates through paypal.com - so i thought i needed a PayPal account for it. I'll have another look. I wonder how much of a cut they take - the reason i don't use PayPal is because of ethical considerations. Considerably amplified of late.

Yes I try not to use it but ended up having to when saving my veoh dot com videos of Zorin. Hadn't spotted it is a PayPal site. I am aware Q4OS is looking to get donations from a different route to PayPal but not yet up and running. Perhaps Zorin could do the same.