Arch for Kids

Question

I'm searching for recomendations for a software setup under Arch which might suit a 6 years old- and growing- girl, and able to run in a low powered machine. On her current setup she is "armed" with Firefox -navigation via Bookmarks-, DragonPlayer, Amarok, Kde(Edu|Games) 4, Gcompris and SuperTux, but she's moving:
Her account sits now in my Arch/Kdemod4 laptop, which is rather inconvenient (for me). I recently salvaged one old P4-1.5 computer (with 512 Mb RAM, 80 GB HD and Kiro video card) and I'm setting it  as a workstation for her
As the machine is not exactly powerful anymore, and I want to have some "headroom". I'll be skipping KDE for the first time in many years, and settling for something lighter as  DE (before you ask, IMHO awesome is still not for her ). I'm now in process of installing and testing LXDE, XFCE, IceWM and JWM, and see which is more "bang for the buck"  in this use case (and have some fun at testing ...)
In any case i'll lose -for now- all the KDE software we are used to. And I have -probably- to search for Gtk alternatives
I think is time also to search for more kids oriented software which might run under Arch (read, in the official or AUR repositories). I haven't found a similar topic on the forum, so I dare to ask the community for counsel
  Asshur
      Intermitent linuxer since 1996, some distro-hopping and  fixed Archer since 2007, ...

Answer 1

Bonzodog wrote:
My 5 year old daughter uses my Zenwalk Linux laptop with its default setup on xfce quite happily. It opens FF automatically, is very fast and very lightweight.
Trust me, teaching her to right click for the menu is not hard -- I suspect you arent used to the idea of a right click root menu yourself, and think it will be too difficult. Its not., trust me.
You have a chance to uniquely mould your daughter as a linux from birth user, one of the next "linux is all I know, whats windows?" generation.
Everything for her is setup in her own account which she can log onto easily, I set a custom wallpaper for her (A lazytown Stephanie one), and she mostly plays flash games in FF. There are tons of free kids flash games. I found one that is more or less a link farm to about a hundred others, called http://www.freebratzdressupgames.com
I set it so the panels hide automatically, and FF is fullscreen.
I also let her use my awesome/arch desktop machine, which has a dvorak keyboard (I found one I could physically swap the keys on), so she is learning to type with both layouts, and already has both hands in use when typing.  She has also been introduced to the Terminal, and understands the concept of it.
Her classroom at school has a windows machine --her own comment was; "ugh, thats such a horrible thing to use, I dont know how anyone else does it", and told her teachers to just install linux (she is very forthright with her opinions) as it has a much faster, prettier, easier to use desktop.
this is the best post i EVER read on the whole internet!
especially the last paragraph
your daughter might be THE CHOSEN ONE
Last edited by robmaloy (2009-03-09 14:16:23)