I have a couple of old netbooks that I want to tidy up and give to the kids for christmas. I was going to put a light linux distro on and then try and lock it down for kids use, but then read of kid specific distros. Has anyone tried one (aracer?) any recommendations?

Or any Linux applications I should be thinking of for kids – whether content control or games activities?

Cheers

I saw this on KickStarter recently. I’m not sure if the Distro they provide is available separately?
KANO

Following this with interest. I’ve just put mint 12 (found in a stack of DVDs) on an old laptop just to see. No experience of an os other than windows.

The Kano is interestign but I expect it wont have all the drivers for even a basic netbook. The kids distro build needs to be ontop of something more widely used.

The Kano also runs on ARM not X86 so not going to be any good for a netbook.

As far as I can see the Kano is just packaging a Raspberry-Pi in a fancy box along with some extras and making some money. Its not really adding anything to the party.

Qimo4Kids
I’ve not used it, but it’s specifically designed for kids.
Personally though, I would go down the Edubuntu or Lunbuntu route, then just customise it.

cheers samj
Qimo look sinteresting and I know that Ubuntu supports my hardware so it should work. Will download and have a play tonight.

I cant get the qimo iso to run off a bootable USB so I had a go at Sugar
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Welcome_to_the_Sugar_Labs_wiki

And I cant say I like it. Very alien (more so than normal even for Linux 😉 ) and really it’s more aimed at the computer per child program with collaborative classroom groups etc.

So any others in from the day shift with ideas?

Anyone tried Edubuntu? I think thats the next one to try…

Not kids orientated but I’ve just put Elementary OS on an old Dell desktop for my 84 year old Mum to write some letters and maybe email. Looks very nic, seems simple to use and is pretty quick.

Cheers SB, off for a look.
(of course ideally Id run chromium on them, which I have done before – basically turning them into chromebooks, but there’s no Adobe support so some addins dont run).

I could have another look at that though. Hexxeh builds.

What age kids? I only ask, as my 4- and 6-year olds can use Windows 7 for some basic things (playing flash games, searching for pictures of kittens, drawing pictures of “ultimate epic awesome power rangers”, etc.

If they can work W7 (with a little guidance initially), then they’ll be fine with Mint or similar.

3 and 6 going on 7.
I could just leave the netbooks with a copy of Lubuntu on and set them up with book marks in chrome to games/cbbc etc.
But wanted to short cut to a suite of kids games in a distro. Im sure I could just sudo get them myself.

Perhaps something with KDE, like Kubuntu? It’s easily configured to be more like a tablet with big icons etc, with the advantage of an Ubuntu ‘backbone’ & support?
As for kids games, Python with Numpy should get them started 😉

That keyboard looks sweet!

Oh and FWIW, docky is always a nice little UI addition: http://wiki.go-docky.com/index.php?title=Welcome_to_the_Docky_wiki