Episode 155 – Death of Flash

3 Comments

• alfonso says:

  July 24, 2015 at 9:45 am

  I had to give up on this episode because the volume is soooo low on mary’s and matt’s microphone yet again, I know the audio version is better but I never listen to audio podcasts I hope it’ll eventually be fixed as I really like the show when I can hear it.

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• johanv says:

  September 1, 2015 at 4:35 am

  Hey SMLR,
  I want to react on Tony’s question about Linux distributions for kids. Chances are of course that I won’t tell you anything new, because I am behind listening to your episodes, but I post this just in case.

  I have two children: a boy aged 5 and a girl aged 3. When my son was 2 and something, I installed doudou linux for him, on an old laptop. It’s a debian based distribution, and it boots into a menu from which you can start some games, including the gcompris suite Mary mentioned in the show.

  You can also choose to start the ‘full desktop environment’, which is running some kind of Lxde if I remember it correctly.

  It contains some very basic games like ‘gamine’. When you move the mouse, it draws a line. When you click, it puts a circle. When you press the space bar, you can start over. Although it is very basic, little children seem to like it, and it is a great way to learn to use the mouse. (I guess mouses will be around for some time, especially on computers in schools ;))

  Gcompris and Childsplay have games that learn you click, use the keyboard, recognize letters and colours. I didn’t know a lot about those suites, but my son found out how they worked just by trying them.

  Since it is a Debian based system, I was able to apt-get install abiword (He liked just typing, and see the characters he types appearing on the screen in big couloured letters. So he learned how to change the font size and color.) I also installed firefox, because I had some issues with some evil flash based games on the stock browser.

  All internet traffic is nicely sent through squid with iptables rules, I guess it does some filtering on the websites you visit. I did not look into this, but it did not cause any troubles as far as I remember.

  Doudoulinux is available in several languages. We used the dutch version, so I had to do some hacking, because we live in Belgium, and keyboard layout is different as in the Netherlands. There were also some issues with bad translations, but hey, lots of people speak bad dutch to our kids, they know that people make mistakes 😉

  For the bad news: The latest release of doudoulinux is quite old, I am not sure whether the debian distribution it is based on, is still supported. They did announce in march that a new version is coming, but I think it is not there yet.

  What I did now, was installing a linux mint xfce edition now, with one user and autologin, and installed gamine, gcompris and childsplay on there. My son being 5 now helps his siter with finding the applications, so that seems to work 🙂

  Since my son is starting to read, I also recently installed scratch, which seems a very cool tool to learn how to program. But I didn’t show him yet.

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  • Tony says:

    September 12, 2015 at 10:35 am

    Johanv,
    Thank you very much for your comment! Doudou is the next I was going to try. I tried one called Quimo but it was very old (Xubuntu 10.4) after upgradeing from lts to lts it ended up breaking all the customizations that Quimo had. so I think I will try Doudou next. also thanks for the part about how your kids did with it!

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