2004-04-08

A Babe in Tuxland

Joe Barr on Slashdot writes:

"This is the kind of story that WagEd and MS would love to see in one of their astroturf campaigns. But this story is real grassroots, with a real Sysadmin writing it and a real granddaughter as the babe using Linux. A sweet tale, with tips on Linux for kids."

There is a great post in the discussion following:

My daughter is almost 3 and has been using her own KDE session on my Debian box for the past few months. I set up a username for her, so that I could log her in and know that she couldn't mess up anything I cared about.

We were gobsmacked when we realised that she had figured out how to type her username and password, though. She was *so* pleased with herself when she got that sussed out.

On her desktop, she has Mozilla Firefox set to go to BBC CBeebies [bbc.co.uk] - appropriate content for pre-school and you can't 'escape' the site, since all links are internal. She also enjoys using TuxPaint to draw pictures for us.

I'm hoping she's going to do a spot of Toddler Linux Advocacy at the local playgroups soon ...

Really excellent article, they use SUSE 9.0 (haven't really tried that yet) and KDE (my fav). I may be rethinking the OS I'm putting on the girls' computers... I was (regretfully) going to put Win98 up so they can play the games they have... But with the free stuff that comes with Linux (Maybe Fedora? Or try a better one like Debian...) perhaps I should rethink this plan...