[vox] Heresy! AOL on Linux?

[Dave Margolis]

I too had AOL at my parent's house (this was back when AOL was at version 
3.0 and they had just made their big jump from pay by the minute to pay 
per month).  It took a lot of patience just to get online in those days.

Anyway, it took me a while to "ween" myself from AOL even though, as an 
increasingly "tech-savvy" guy, I knew it wasn't cool to use AOL.  When I 
got to college, the university provided free dialup and it was easy to say 
goodbye.

AOL puts three key things all in one place: e-mail, web, and chat.

I promise you can make your sister happy enough in a couple of ways:

1. mail: aol webmail, or mozilla/kmail with some other pop account

she may think it's the end of the world to change addresses, but she'll 
probably live.  aol itself is a fairly flexible e-mail client so i doubt 
she'll be happy with just aol webmail.  It's my suspicion that they make 
their webmail just good enough to please their remote users, but they 
don't want to make it good enough to give anybody an excuse to not use 
their actual product.

2. web: mozilla/konquerer

3. chat: gaim/aol's linux aim client/jbuddy messenger (java-based)/kit (or 
whatever kde is calling it's im client these days)

AOLers aren't addicted to AOL as much as they are addicted to the 
user-friedly single envronment.  Remember when star-office 5 tried to put 
all of those tools into one window and how ugly that was?  AOL makes users 
accustomed to seeing the whole interenet that way.  It's your job to 
gracefully transistion your sis from that look and feel by putting all her 
tools in an easy to find and use configuration.  I've found that with 
Kmail's bountiful toolbar options you can make the damn thing look almost 
anyway you want, so you may be able to tweak it to look like AOL mail.

She's not going to care about browsing.  I bet that transistion will be 
easier.  Nothing besides AOL supports AOL keywords right?  Does she use 
that alot?

Gaim supports almost all of the AIM features, and more so than the actual 
AOL linux client.  With gaim she can file transfer, use her favorite buddy 
icons, blah, blah, blah.  She can convert her AOL username to a free AIM 
username if she ditches AOL alltogether, or continue to pay that extra $10 
a month to use AOL along with whatever ISP she's using.

The first time she gets infected with a crippling amount of ad/spyware 
(which seems to be happening to everyone I know lately), she might be more 
inclined to let you change her OS.

I recently set my mother-in-law up with linux/kde/konquerer/kmail on an 
outdated laptop, and she e-mails people everyday and does a little 
browsing.  I don't even think she knows she's using linux.  She just knows 
that she gets about 80% less junk mail and hasn't seen an unsolicited 
pop-up in months...

Another suggestion (and I probably shouldn't make this suggestion on this 
list - I really do prefer the idea of reviving her old laptop with linux) 
would be to convince your parents to buy her an ibook.  She can keep AOL 
and you can breath a sigh of relief that as her tech-support guy you have 
one less windows user...

Dave

Richard Crawford wrote:

> I would love to divorce my little sister from AOL altogether, actually. 
> My parents don't even use it for connectivity anymore (apparently with
> version 9 you can use all of AOL's features even when you're dialed in
> through another service -- this way my parents can have DSL and wireless
> in their home).  I have no idea why my sister so desperately needs to
> have AOL, but she's aghast at the idea of giving it up.
> 
> 
> On Fri, 2004-06-25 at 00:17, Rod Roark wrote:
> 
>>On Thursday 24 June 2004 11:48 pm, Richard Crawford wrote:
>>
>>>I know it seems morally outrageous, but I'm committed to rebuilding my
>>>little sister's ancient laptop computer this weekend.  I'd love to
>>>install FC1 on it, or perhaps Debian, but she's married to AOL 9.0. 
>>>Anyone know if it's possible to get AOL 9 running on a Linux box?  If
>>>not, that's fine.  I'll just have to track down a copy of Win98 with a
>>>valid license.  :)
>>
>>Looks like AOL is nowhere close to working with Wine.
>>
>>However I'm pretty sure you can access it with a standard
>>web browser - not sure how much you can do that way though.
>>If AIM is important, there are some good Linux clients for
>>it such as Gaim.
>>
>>So it depends on what exactly she wants to do, but I suspect
>>she's going to be stuck with Windows.
>>
>>-- Rod
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