Linux and a 9 year-old

General Topics
1

Good idea 8)
Edubuntu, a nine year old, and savvy parents–sounds textbook right? Next, the headline: Pentagon Hacked by 9-year-old. This guy has an interesting idea though, put his nine year old on an inexpensive Linux machine for his school, gaming, and general computing pleasure. Not a bad idea, and it does give him the advantage of doing something with an old PC he had lying around. Is it an option for most people with older computers? I think not. Linux is great, but it can be tricky. Sometimes it isn’t worth the hassle, but for this nine year old it seems like it will work well. What would you give your kids, and why?

http://www.philoking.com/2006/12/04/edubuntu-a-real-life-experiment-linux-and-a-9-year-old/

2

Since the subject of Linux was brought up: I recently acquired an older PIII comp to use as a spare. I have been thinking of using it to dive into Linux. What do you folks recommend for someone with no Linux experience?

3

I would recommend Kubuntu I think the KDE interface is much more user friendly for beginners then the Gnome interface.

www.kubuntu.org

4
Xubuntu is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu. Unlike its parent, however, Xubuntu uses the light-weight XFce desktop environment and is optimised for lower-end machines. The distribution includes only GTK+ applications where possible.

http://distrowatch.com/
Hi Gene, hope this helps.

5

Gene, Justin posted all I’ll recommend:

6

I mainly use Debian Sarge, Knoppix and Ubuntu/Kubuntu. I had an old 350Mhz system lying around and decided I wanted to learn Linux. That’s what started it for me. Ubuntu/Kubuntu is easier to set up, but seems a little sparse on older hardware support for me. Knoppix is the best I’ve found for driver support, but it is not recommended for HDD install.

7

Thanks for all the fast replies. I have just downloaded Kubuntu. and I shall give it a try. I hope this old bird (63) can learn something new. Let’s see if I can do as well as a 9 year-old. Lol…

8

Glad to hear it, good luck with your setup :slight_smile:

9

I’ll just suggest installation of ubuntu-desktop package onto the kubuntu system, it will solve many problems before they’ll appear.

10

[OffTopic]
Old Bird, Spring Chicken, when compared to an 82 year old that was on the news. He is in the third grade, now that his country in Africa (can’t recall which one), said that all would get an elementary education, he turned up wanting to enrol and get an education as he had never been to school. He goes to school with his 15 year old grandson.
[/OffTopic]