Arch for Kids

asshur · 2009-03-06 11:49:14

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, ...

Procyon · 2009-03-06 11:56:56

Definitely check here:
http://gwos.org/doku.php/games:arcade

toad · 2009-03-06 11:57:23

Don't see why you shouldn't be running KDE4 on those specs - should still fly (once it's up).

asshur · 2009-03-06 12:30:41

toad wrote:

Don't see why you shouldn't be running KDE4 on those specs - should still fly (once it's up).

I'm a KDE die-hard, so it is not a flame war.

The machine has its obscure points: performance had degraded -under M$ XP- to absolutely unacceptable levels, and it was not only an OS related thing. The network part i've solved simply switching to Linux (even with a ndiswrapper card), but i still unable to come to grips with the HD (some 30G data to be migrated elsewhere).

To offset that less than ideal conditions, i want the infraestructure software (OS, DE) to tax the machine as little as possible.

Using Arch over canned distributions makes a world of difference.

I know there is a lot of cache, but when I suspend my laptop (in end user mode, Kdemod4 most of the time) the minimum amount to be swapped-out is over the 400 Mb mark, and -according to free- an over the 200 Mb RAM tax with KDE is a given. It should normally be enough headroom, but on this machine I want to play on the safer -leaner in this case- side.

And, what the hell, i want to experiment a little and now have a wonderful excuse to test lightweight DEs

asshur · 2009-03-06 12:45:36

Procyon wrote:

Definitely check here:
http://gwos.org/doku.php/games:arcade

Thanks a lot. But she won't see this page in the near future
There should be time for homework and family. Tx God, most arcade games are "shooters" and she isn't so fond of them. But I am, but on thight schedule to become a package maintainer

tjwoosta · 2009-03-06 15:03:53

i suggest either xfce, lxde, or maybe even a minimalistic gnome

fluxbox or openbox might be a little too much getting used to for an unsuspecting kid, depending on how you set it up

any of the tiling window managers might also be too much

but xfce, lxde, gnome, kde they are all fairly familliar feeling to anyone

right now my parents are running an old desktop with 512 mb ram and it runs minimal gnome fairly smoothly (im sure it could probably run kde too)

lucke · 2009-03-06 15:09:20

With the packages from testing my netbook running KDE4 and some apps uses 120 MB RAM.

brazzmonkey · 2009-03-06 15:34:06

personally, I'd choose XFCE.

asshur · 2009-03-06 18:57:46

ATM i'm not interested on recomendations regarding DE. i've toyed with most of them already. I have my plans for serious testing the so called lightweights, and in due moment i plan to share my findings i'll test also a lean KDE just in case (Lucke's data fit into my bill)
My real problem is that beyond Gcompris and KDEedu my knowledge of K12 software is extremely limited, and i'm in doubt for general use (file manager, multimedia player, editor, ...) which would be more fitting for kids (and don't bring the machine on their knees)

evilgold · 2009-03-07 00:19:36

I would look into the apps included with edubuntu for a start. http://www.edubuntu.org/applications/8.10

For media on older machines i always find that mplayer works pretty well. I personally use gnome-mplayer as a front end.

You really should use Awesome, every 6 year old should know the ins and outs of lua and screen management ;-)

blampars · 2009-03-07 00:44:13

My 6 year old daughter can spend loads of time using Tux Paint.

it's in the community repo - tuxpaint
good extras for tux paint come from AUR -
tuxpaint-config
tuxpaint-stamps

you can do all kinds of fun stuff with this little app. I've even gotten caught up in it from time to time, just playing with all the stamps and options and listening to the crazy sound effects, haha

she really hasnt shown much of an interest in anything else, except the games at nickjr.com

good luck,
-b

peets · 2009-03-07 03:03:45

http://www.squeakland.org/

firecat53 · 2009-03-07 07:01:52

etoys looks cool! Anyone able to get this working? I've got arch64 and I can't get past deb2targz

Scott

Dieter@be · 2009-03-07 09:15:04

kids are great learners. I don't think you can really do wrong with gnome/kde/xfce. maybe install them all, use any of them as default and show your daughter how to try another one (log out to gdm, pick other session)

chfoxli · 2009-03-07 11:40:57

The gnome-desktop with the standard gnome-games and gcompris is a good and sufficient setup for my kids, 4 and 6 years old. The are quite happy with. My older kids, 12 and 16 years, surely, all stuff related to the internet: pidgin, claws-mail, miro, epipany-browser etc. but also audio- and images-apps like hydrogen, solfege, gimp, k3b, Sometimes I ask them to learn with kde-edu-apps like kbruch, kgeograpy etc.. But Gnome is definitifly our desktop of choice. No problem with PIII and 512M.

Bonzodog · 2009-03-07 15:48:38

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.

xelados · 2009-03-09 05:06:06

That's awesome, Bonzo.

whaevr · 2009-03-09 13:46:02

@firecat53
deb2targz is in the aur, works fine here (arch64)

asshur · 2009-03-09 14:07:30

¿Is it me or there seems to be, other than flash games, a dearth of material for kids older than the gcompris target group (IMHO up to second grade) but still not teenagers?

Etoys looks promising, but cleary USA developed ... still battling with intenationalization :-(
My daughter is also very fond of Tux-Paint ...

robmaloy · 2009-03-09 14:15:05

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)

firecat53 · 2009-03-09 16:41:00

@whaevr - sorry I wasn't clear - deb2targz makes the package fine, but it will not install:

sudo pacman -U EtoysInstaller.tar.gz
Password:
loading package data...
error: missing package metadata in EtoysInstaller.tar.gz
error: 'EtoysInstaller.tar.gz': invalid or corrupted package

Thanks,
Scott

iggyst00ge · 2009-03-09 17:21:26

I found I didn't want my four year old clicking around the filesystem in Thunar, and didn't need the full overhead of XFCE, so I settled on OpenBox with the XFCE panels running on top of it. Added some menus and launch buttons for him, and it's worked out quite well.

He mostly uses Gcompris, ChildsPlay, TuxPaint, and Adventure (the Atari 2600 game).

Chris

mandog · 2009-03-09 20:27:17

My 4 1/2 yr old boy uses my old desktop with full gnome environment never hold a child back or under estimate there learning ability by trying to limit them. Just put all the learning aids and they will sort it out for them selves faster than we did.

&#32 Greg · 2009-03-12 00:41:25

firecat53 wrote:

@whaevr - sorry I wasn't clear - deb2targz makes the package fine, but it will not install:
sudo pacman -U EtoysInstaller.tar.gz
Password:
loading package data...
error: missing package metadata in EtoysInstaller.tar.gz
error: 'EtoysInstaller.tar.gz': invalid or corrupted package
Thanks,
Scott

Don't you need to do a makepkg -s on the tar.gz and then do Pacman -U on the pkg.tar.gz?

Daenyth · 2009-03-12 03:38:17

I seem to recall a forum thread asking about what games were good for children -- try searching

Arch Linux

#1 2009-03-06 11:49:14

Arch for Kids

#2 2009-03-06 11:56:56

Re: Arch for Kids

#3 2009-03-06 11:57:23

Re: Arch for Kids

#4 2009-03-06 12:30:41

Re: Arch for Kids

#5 2009-03-06 12:45:36

Re: Arch for Kids

#6 2009-03-06 15:03:53

Re: Arch for Kids

#7 2009-03-06 15:09:20

Re: Arch for Kids

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Re: Arch for Kids

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