Sometimes the things you want don't happen until you stop trying so hard. For as long as we've had Intel-compatible computers here at home, my parents have been running Windows. At first I didn't care—this was before I had even heard about Linux, let alone install it—but as I became more and more involved in Linux, I wanted more and more for them to make the change, too. Especially given how I'm still supposed to be responsible for making sure their machine keeps running; if I wasn't, I wouldn't care as much. These are the approaches I've taken to try to convert them, and why they failed:

• At first, I tried convincing them that Windows sucks and that they should use "something else, something better". This approach utterly failed, simply because Windows did not suck as much as I claimed it was. I was advocating something I believed in, but my arguments weren't fully on target. Whether or not this was intentional isn't something I remember fully (it's been somewhere about nine years), but I do remember it did fail because of that.
• Next, I made Linux boot up as default. They still could boot up Windows if they so chose, but they had to make a decision at exactly the right time. This approach utterly failed because it caused them to associate Linux with annoyances. Bad idea.
• The next step was to get annoyed at having to fix Windows every few months because of viruses and spyware and whatnot, and just not doing it. This was not a conscious decision; but having to reinstall a system from scratch is no fun, and eventually I got so fed up with it that I kept postponing it. At some point this turned into a strategy to subvert them into running Linux, by giving them "temporary" replacements for things that broke down. This would start with installing Free Software on Windows; using Thunderbird for e-mail, or OpenOffice.org as their office suite. Some of these replacements (such as Thunderbird, after I explained the security issues in Outlook Express) would be accepted with ease; others (such as OpenOffice.org, where my dad was much more used to Microsoft Office) would face initial resistance. They have eventually come to accept all of them, however.
  The approach failed because I was never up-front about my intentions (even if initially there were none, they did eventually surface). As such, they kept seeing some things as "temporary" replacements and never invested any time into trying to learn the system, whereas I was postponing reinstallation as long as I could. Eventually, this led to an argument which resulted in the next strategy.
• The next attempt was a direct result of the failure of the previous one; I asked them to give the system a chance, and they agreed to seriously try Debian for a few months. After those few months, we would sit together and decide what would be done; I promised to reinstall Windows if they decided that Linux wasn't good enough. Contrary to what I expected, the approach failed. Their main argument was that it was too slow. This was not totally unexpected, since their system at the time was a 133Mhz Pentium I running Windows 98 (I believe); installing Sarge with Gnome on that was a bad idea. I had tried a few things to speed up matters about halfway through the experiment; but unfortunately that didn't cut it. I now realise that the reason the attempt failed was that I was insufficiently prepared, and that I had to cobble together a workable environment for them in just a few days. Had I had a bit more time, I could've looked around for a useful yet not resource-hungry interface that would've made the system useable for them, and they might have accepted it. Oh well.
  Or I could've just bought them a new system and have them use that. Hah.
• After the failed attempt, I just plain gave up. I didn't remove the Linux partition from their machine, but I did not expect them to boot it anymore, either. A few months passed. I received an SMP box from Osamu, and replaced their aging box with my 650Mhz Pentium III. Eventually, my dad asked me about creating some poster for the theater group where he was directing a piece. What he wanted to do (having an utter mish-mash of letters of all sizes and forms as a backdrop) required a DTP application, or at least a decent graphical application; while I am aware of such applications for the Windows platform, I do not actually have them. So I said "I can help you with that, but it'll have to be under Linux". I rebooted the box, installed scribus (which, through the miracles of synaptic, looked to him like I was just fine-tuning a few things), showed him how it worked, and let him do it.
  A while later, he wanted to print out a picture. Similarly, I know of Windows applications to do this, but I helped him use The Gimp—under Linux.
  Another while later (now a month ago), they wanted to keep better track of their income and their expenses. Again, I know of Windows applications to do this, but gave them gnucash, because I know that best. This actually is the first application in the list that they now use on an almost daily basis. These days, when I get up and take a peek at their system, more often than not it runs Linux. And since I configured it (at their request) to run 'shutdown -h now' by cron at 1:30 AM (to force them to go to bed), this means that they actually choose to run Linux in the morning now, rather than just not bothering to reboot or shut down the machine when they want to. I expect they've finally chosen to use Linux instead of Windows for the things they want to use a computer for, even though they don't know it themselves yet. I can only be happy about that.

All in all, my message is this: if you want to convert people like my parents—who couldn't care less about all this freedom stuff and whatnot, shit just has to work for them—to Linux, then you should make sure that they have a reason to use it. They didn't use it when I tried to push them behind the curtains. They didn't use it when I tried to push them openly. They only decided to use it when, eventually, they had a solid reason to use Linux: there were applications there that weren't available on Windows. Of course, there's nothing in gnucash, the gimp, or scribus that prevents me from installing it on Windows. But installing software on Windows is such a pain—and, well, I did have a hidden agenda.

This weekend, I started modifying the way I use disk space on rock, my home desktop and server. rock used to be a PentiumIII running at 650Mhz, until I received an SMP box from Osamu Aoki when he moved back to Japan and couldn't take it with him. So rock is now a dual Celeron 433Mhz, and the machine that originally served as my desktop went on to replace pop, my parent's box. A little while later, rock's hard disk died, and I was left with a single 13G hard disk (or so I thought). At that point, I used the sarge installer to install rock on an LVM system, so that I could easily enlarge the volumes in the installation later on, without having to start copying files for no good reason. When I later on bought a second-hand 80G hard disk to add to the LVM system, I found that there were in fact two more hard disks inside rock, which simply hadn't been connected to the IDE controllers; one was 20G large, the other 40G. So I added them all, and enlarged all the volumes that could use some extra space. A while later, I started worrying. What if one of the disks would die? Reading the documentation, I found that I would lose all the LVM volumes that were on the dead disk, even if only partially. Obviously there's also an option to get LVM to mount partial volumes to get at the data that's still available, but it didn't sound too hopeful. In short, I became convinced that what I was doing wasn't all that sure for my data. Obviously I have backups of the important stuff, but avoiding failure is always preferable over having to use recovery procedures, even if they're good recovery procedures. So I decided that I would migrate to a setup that would use at least some redundancy; that way, I could stop worrying as much. And since I had four disks, there should've been a way to do that. I started partitioning, and found that I had overlooked a second 40G hard disk that rock was using; so rather than creating a RAID5 array on top of two 33G partitions (on the 40G and 80G disks) and one RAID0 array or something similar (combining the 13G and 20G disks), I decided to create a 40G RAID5 array composed of two 40G disks and one 40G partition on an 80G disk. All other disk space (the other 40G on the 80G disk, and the 20G and 13G disks) would be combined into an LVM volume group for less important data (such as the squid cache and other large parts of /var, swap space, and a bunch of digitized CD's of which I still have the originals). Also, the RAID5 array wouldn't just be one large volume or so; instead, I created another LVM volume group in the RAID array. Theoretically I could of course combine everything in one volume group and use pvmove and/or the right options on lvcreate to force important volumes on the RAID array, but then having separate volume groups for RAID/no RAID would force me to think carefully before managing volumes, which is never a bad idea. So on Friday I started moving data. This would involve running pvmove on a particular physical volume until all data would be removed from it; then run vgreduce -a <vgname> to remove the physical volume from it; use the just-freed drive to create new partitions on it to hold the live data; copy the live data over; and start doing pvmove again. Rinse, repeat, until all data is copied over and/or you've freed enough disks to create the RAID array. Luckily one can create a RAID array in degraded mode, or the procedure would've involved updating my backups, verifying them, wiping the hard disks, and reinstalling. As it is, I could get away with creating partitions that were just large enough to hold all data, and hoping people wouldn't try creating more data. I started working on this on Friday, and am just now, over 48 hours later, finishing up. It should've been possible to do all this in far less time; but rather than explaining what went wrong, let me just say, for the record, that I hate hardware. And that I should plan better. Anyway. The last stumbling block was the fact that the system simply wouldn't boot from the new root device. The reason was fairly obvious; the initrd was generated when mdadm was not installed yet, so had to be regenerated. But after calling yaird with the right options, it still wouldn't work. It took me a while to figure it out; but eventually, I found that yaird will read your /etc/fstab to find out about your root device; that it will see how it can get at that root device (where it's smart enough to know about md devices and LVM devices etc); and that it will then add the right software to the initrd based on that. Sure enough, my temporary root device that I had put outside of any LVM thing on /dev/hdb3 did have /dev/hdb3 as its root partition. So yaird didn't think mdadm was necessary. Heh. Quick edit fixed that. So now I have my important data on an LVM system on RAID5, and my less important data still on LVM. Me happy.