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There is no better way to promote Linux and demolish some of its myths (such as, for example, its extreme complexity, etc.) than by getting kids to start playing and using it at a very young age.. For this reason, we will discuss some of the appropriate distributions for them. Before we start, a comment: yes, any Linux distro can be used by a boy, much more today that kids are very smart. However, there are some distros that are more enjoyable and easy to understand, especially for the little ones. |
Qimo for boys:> 3 years
Qimo for Kids is an Ubuntu-based distro with a desktop designed exclusively for kids. It comes with loads of pre-installed "educational games" for kids over 3 years old. The interface is very simple and intuitive and it has large and striking icons so that children find everything easy.
According to the developers, the difference between Qimo and Edubuntu is that Qimo was developed to be a desktop operating system for any kid's PC, whereas Edubuntu would have been designed to be used on a school computer network. Furthermore, Qimo has a very user-friendly interface and design, without complicated menus or multiple windows. Lastly, Qimo runs directly from the LiveCD without having Ubuntu installed previously.
Qimo uses XFCE to provide a fast and ultralight environment. The minimum requirements are: 256MB of memory to run from the CD, or 192MB to install. At least 6GB of disk space and 400MHz processor or more.
Sugar: <6 years
Sugar is a Fedora-based distro, designed exclusively for Prof. Nicolas Negroponte's famous project One-Laptop-Per-Child (OLPC). It is aimed at children under 6 years old and is quite different from the rest of the distros, allowing them to have fun but also to learn and develop their programming skills. There are two cons. The first is that it is entirely designed to be used in class. The second is that it is so different from the rest of the distros and the desktop environment differs so much from that of any Linux that in the end it seems that another operating system is being used.
Edubuntu: 3-18 years
Ubuntu has a derived version, officially supported by Canonical, called Edubuntu, specifically geared toward primary and secondary schools.
This distro comes in 3 "flavors": "young", "plain" and "default", for young users, desktop only or a general use version. The desktop environment used is the same as Ubuntu (GNOME) and the pre-installed applications are OpenOffice.org, KDE Education Suite y gcompris. The KDE Edutainment Suite includes applications for children between the ages of 3 and 18, while Gcompris includes applications for preschool children.
LinuxKidX: 2-15 years
LinuxKidX It was designed for children between 2 and 15 years old. It uses KDE as its desktop environment and is based on slackware. Some of the pre-installed programs are KStars (a virtual host), Kalzium (the famous table of elements), KTouch (typing tutor), KGeography, KWordQuiz, ChildsPlay and many more. The project does not seem to have much popularity or support from the community. For this reason, it would be advisable to run it first from the LiveCD and play with it for a while before finally installing it.
Foresight for Kids: 3-12 years
Foresight for Kids is a distro derived from Foresight Linux, specifically geared towards children between 3 and 12 years of age. It comes with GNOME as a desktop environment and includes Tuxpaint, Tuxtyping, Gcompris, Tux of Math Command, Super Tux, Super Tux Card, Foobillard, GNU Chess, Nibbles, Frozen Bubble, Super Maryo Chronicles, F-Spot Photo Manager, Firefox Web Browser , Banshee Media Player, Pidgin Instant Messenger and Totem Movie Player, among others. Children's attention is immediately attracted by the little bee that appears on the desktop background. If you are looking for a distro for your baby, try this distro that is very good.
Beware!
Just in case: unless you run them from the LiveCD, running any of these distros implies the installation of a complete operating system, they are not applications that can be run from Windows just like that.
Good! Good contribution!
Cheers! Paul.
There are two distributions for children that you do not mention and I think they can be useful for the Latin community are edulibre OS and Edubuntumx the first includes the winkipedia so it is not necessary to be connected to be able to make queries, the second is optimized for use in Castilian and is based as its name says in Edubuntu.
Very dear,
Sugar is not "exclusively" for OLPC, it can be run on (almost) any distro, or better yet, directly from a USB without requiring a hard drive or operating system installed. This can be a great advantage, since it does not need to be installed "fixed" on a given computer, but the child can take their entire system, including data, on a USB flash drive.
link -> Sugar on a stick
another is not "aimed at children under 6 years old." There are activities for all ages, generally being used with school-age children, but without limits. (Example the image you have on the page, do you think a 6-year-old jug would program that?)
It is not true that «it is entirely designed to be used in class», on the contrary its independent use is emphasized, which brings us to the other point, its design is supposedly more intuitive for children, so «to be different» is seen as a virtue, being better and not following difficult guidelines for children that is the interface of many distros. And true, it does not look like Widows or Mac ...
As we are at it, there is no distro or activity pack at this time really useful to "be used in class", in any that you mention here, and that is missing ...
Hello! First of all, thanks x comment. Regarding being able to carry Sugar on a USB, that is completely true. It's something I forgot to mention so thank you for mentioning it. In fact, if I mentioned it, it's because I was thinking that anyone can download and install it. Otherwise, if it had been a distro that is only part of an educational plan, I would not have put it on the list.
On the other hand, the official Sugar page clearly states that it is a distro that is used in school settings: «Sugar is the core component of a worldwide effort to provide every child with equal opportunity for a quality education. Available in 25 languages, Sugar's Activities are used every school day by one-million children in more than forty countries. » That does not mean that it is used only in school settings, but it is its strong point.
Regarding the design, it was not my intention to mention that it was SO different from Win or Mac, but rather that it is different from any Linux distro, with which the use of Sugar as a "first step" to immerse yourself in the "Linux world" ends up being a bit ambiguous. It was just that ...
Once again, thanks x comment. I found your observations very acute!
I just wanted to thank you for your compilation and information work. It has been very useful to me when choosing a distro for my daughter and for my wife's students.
A greeting.
I HAVE A 3-YEAR-OLD GIRL AND IS ALREADY INTERESTED IN COMPUTERING THIS IS A GREAT CONTRIBUTION !!
I'm glad it serves! Cheers! Paul.
On this page there is also a good article about it:
http://ubuntu.mylifeunix.com/?p=278
FLASH online games do not work well despite having a new computer ...
In fact the online Shockwave games for kids that my 6 year old nephew loves just don't work….
Any ideas to make them work?
The same thing happens to me. Flash works fine for me, but it doesn't work when it comes to "interacting" (pressing buttons, etc.) with the user. 🙁 We will have to wait for an update of the plugins. If you ask me, I don't think this is a Linux flaw but Adobe's not releasing good Linux plugins and not opening Flash source code.
Hello:
Just provide some clarification about Sugar. It is not an environment of desks, folders, bins, etc. It is a learning environment centered on the metaphor of the child and his environment. ASi is that the views are of the neighborhood, your friends and the activities you have to develop. The photo is not exactly attractive, it only shows the turtle activity with the steps to build the clock, this is one of the activities that the Logo refloats but it is not the least part of what Sugar is. If it also focuses on learning, its proposal is to learn by experimenting, so there are multiple activities, many in the form of games.
In addition, the complete Gcompris is carried in the form of individual activities, the tuxpaint, the tuxmath, a mathematical tetris, a SIMCity, the open source strategy game "Battle for Wsenoth", etc, etc. That is, there are games, and plenty.
Great contribution. Thanks for completing and improving the post!
Olá for everyone,
You must write in Portuguese so as not to offend anything like "portunhol". 🙂
There is here a distribution turned for schools called Pandorga GNU / Linux. Ela é bem turned for or use by children, I have a visual bem adapted for isso. Or endereço do sítio é:
http://pandorga.rkruger.com.br/
Um hug and parabéns pela publicação.
Hi Frederick!
Obrigado by serious comments. I'm trying a little bit of a distro that you recommended and I have to admit that I gosted a lot! Acho que vou fazer um artigo sobre ele. Do you know it can be used in other countries other than Brazil? Is there a version in Spanish?
Hug! Paul.
Interesting! Thank you!
I think EdulibreOS was missing there, which is an Ubuntu-based distribution created for children and complementing the teaching given by teachers. I leave you the links of the project that little by little has been growing and helping more and more to reduce the illiteracy gap in my country Guatemala. http://edulibre.net/ http://www.edulibreos.com/
No problem. I will try to help as much as I can, when times allow.
A big hug and good luck with your new endeavor!
Pablo.
Good morning I am an Informatics Teacher in Venezuela and as you may already know, here we have a distribution made by us called CANAIMA (Auyantepui del Kerepakupai-merú | Angel Falls) that is already in version 3.0 and there is a CANAIMA EDUCATIVA distribution (www.canaimaeducativo .gob.ve) which in my opinion is excellent and you need to place it there .. to make it known
Hello david! we have published several posts about CANAIMA.
Greetings and thanks for commenting !! Paul.
That good! I'm glad!! You gave me the good news of the day. 🙂
Cheers! Paul.
I like linux, I like Qimo 🙂
Buendia Pablo: I am writing to you from the city of Ibague (Tolima- Colombia), just as you have also practiced another profession, that of Agronomist Engineer, since 1993, and only when I advised a peasant community in the Orinoquia and Colombian Amazon, did I experience what it is to be Out of the winXXX world, when I bought a Mac iMac from 2004, from there I jumped to Linux and since then, I have tested the different GNU distros with low-capacity equipment. I am not a programmer nor do I have the skill or knowledge to do so, but in 8 years I have tried linux, red hat, opensolaris systems and I still need to try gentoo. Well from your blog I have downloaded the distro for children, because in three weeks I open a place of a small bookstore cafe in the city of Ibague, there in addition to the new and read books, coffee, drinks, I hope to help friends and bored clients with the winXXX to test linux and learn with it what I have learned about linux until today. Its publication is very useful since in these years many PCs of old data (95, 98, 2000, and more here) I have mounted them with linux and they work 100% unlike their old winXX; Therefore, Pablo, I hope from now on to bother you with conflict queries that may appear in my small business, bye (my landline number is (57) (8) (2633078) and my phone number is 3164105610, my email is luisorlando1@aol.com), bye and again thanks for the information that I met on the rebellion.org page. bye
https://blog.desdelinux.net/doudou-linux-una-distribucion-gnulinux-para-los-mas-peques/
http://ksaukao.blogspot.fr/2013/06/doudoulinux-linux-para-ninos-y-para-los.html
I just mentioned it in another post, in my humble opinion, the best distro for children, even for adults, is rogues. It has countless programs, it is very easy to use and it is much more versatile. I even use it to make my documents, save my photos and make video montages. It has a parental control program for time that I love and many many other programs that are not in the other distributions. If you are not bothered by children's colors, it is a real desktop layout alternative for everyone.
Hey.
Thank you very much for these contributions. The good work they do is appreciated.
Greetings.
On the contrary, thanks to you x comment!
Cheers! Paul.
Mr.,
I am looking for an application to help us continue to move forward with my daughter who has Cerebral Palsy. Last year we found a good progress thanks to the notebook that he uses with the teacher and the psychopedagogue. I'm a bit of a fan of Ubuntu and logically I installed this operating system on the notebook. I have several programs installed but I am not finding one to continue moving forward. My daughter has become familiar with capital printers so I am not finding a program that works only in this way. The numbers are another problem since we can't find a way to really understand their meaning, he does it by counting to 10, sometimes a little more, but there we are. Everything presented is so that if someone on the forum knows or knows an application, they could mention it to me to install and test it. My daughter is 16 years old, she attends a normal school with a special teacher who attends her for an hour and a half and then stays with her classmates from 1st grade. high school year.
I already appreciate your time. Cordially.
Nestor L Sharp
Hello Nestor,
The first thing I want to tell you is that I greatly admire the strength and commitment that you are dedicating to your daughter. It is something that is say not to admire. I don't know if my answer will help you in anything but you can take a look at this particular article, maybe you find something of interest. You can also check this other link.
Another link that may be of interest: Lazarus
I hope you find something else to help your daughter.
A greeting