Last night, I came home from a meeting, kissed my wife, and was walking back upstairs when my coat started vibrating. I pulled my phone out to see that I was too late, and wasn't able to answer a phone call from my dad. I called him back, and here's a summary of the beginning of that conversation.
Me: "Hi dad."
Dad: "Hi"
Me: "Did you call? What did you need?"
Dad: "I did. I installed Ubuntu and now I'm trying to figure out how to install the driver for my video card."
Me: "Waaaaaaaaaaitaminute. There's a backstory here that I have to know before we go any further."
My dad is "technical". I remember as a little kid realizing how excited my dad was when he was installing Windows 95 the day it came out. I spent summers and school holidays making money at the company he worked for by being the floppy swapper when installing software. He was also the person who introduced me to the term "freetard". He's always been pretty resistant to free software, and sometimes for good reason (ever tried sending a document back and forth between on OpenOffice environment and a MS Office environment multiple times?). Last year for Christmas, my little brother Matt received a netbook that got infected before Christmas Day was over. I offered to put Ubuntu on it (something he wanted) but my dad was so resistant that he went out and bought a USB CD-ROM drive just so he could make sure Windows stayed on the machine.
For me, Ubuntu has never been about "So easy my mom can use it", but "So simple my dad doesn't have a reason not to use it".
As the story unfolded, my dad had been exploring the idea of virtual machines for a client, and had installed Ubuntu in a Virtual PC environment on Windows 7 host. Unfortunately, his video would only give him 800x600, when his Windows XP guest would fill his dual-monitor setup easily. He expected this to be a driver issue (Virtual PC apparently doesn't have a driver pack for guests like VirtualBox and VMWare do). I found this article, but as I looked at the instructions, I thought "Holy crap. I wouldn't even do this." It became pretty clear that Microsoft Virtual PC was a pretty hostile environment to anything non-Windows.
At this point, my dad starts asking about the Windows installer he saw for Ubuntu (Wubi). Most of his concern centered around whether or not it was going to screw up his Windows partition (it doesn't). After a bit of talk about Wubi, we ended the phone call.
This morning, I get an email from him that says:
Installed 32-bit Ubuntu on my system last night (Wubi). Booted this morning and found that my USB keyboard/mouse combo is not recognized at Ubuntu login screen. No time to troubleshoot this morning before work and probably won’t spend a great deal of time on it, but wondered if you had any ideas of things I could try this evening.
Sounds like he's got a bluetooth keyboard/mouse combo that is having problems. It's not a happy ending just yet, but it's a giant step in the right direction.
The Chasm. Ubuntu is crossing it.