Hello again,
My sis and a friend of hers are looking to buy PC & printer for use by "the kids" for XMAS. When I say kids, we're talking the 4+ age group.
Obviously the adults will want mail, web, office, etc. but nothing too daunting - thought I'd ask if anyone has hardware + distro recommendations. We're talking easy-to-use once installed and cheap solution.... however I was thinking mini-ITX cases etc.
Any ideas? I want to give them a good base to learn from ;)
Steve
p.s. thought I'd ask on here as still pretty lonely in LUGE at the mo... but it'll get there in time...
I've never purchased from them before but I was in the market for something similar a while back and was looking at the P3 600MHz Dell Optiplex Small Form Factor Base units here -> http://www.speedie.co.uk/baseunits.htm
OK it's not mini-ITX but it's close. If you've got a spare monitor kicking about then you've got a full system for £60 (£72.50 with P&P) albeit second-user. If you haven't got a spare monitor then I have one which you can have for free - if you collect (Gorleston)
This unit should run any recent distro you throw at it and for new users you can't go wrong with Mandrake, SuSE or Fedora although I am sure many people will argue you could do better! My personal favourite at the moment is SuSE 9.1. This will be fine for the adults. The kids should not have too much trouble either, but you can always have a separate log-in for the kids and remove the K-Menu button from the taskbar and then splatter the taskbar and desktop with nice big icon links to their games and cbeebies website, etc - damage limitation exercise. Somewhere in the dark recessess of my mind I remember there being some sort of KDE add-on that replaced the taskbar with a dedicated program launcher - kids might find something like that easier?
Rgds,
Martin
On Fri, 2004-10-01 at 13:01, Steve Purkiss wrote:
Hello again,
My sis and a friend of hers are looking to buy PC & printer for use by "the kids" for XMAS. When I say kids, we're talking the 4+ age group.
On Fri, 2004-10-01 at 13:01, Steve Purkiss wrote:
Hello again,
My sis and a friend of hers are looking to buy PC & printer for use by "the kids" for XMAS. When I say kids, we're talking the 4+ age group.
Obviously the adults will want mail, web, office, etc. but nothing too daunting - thought I'd ask if anyone has hardware + distro recommendations. We're talking easy-to-use once installed and cheap solution.... however I was thinking mini-ITX cases etc.
Any ideas? I want to give them a good base to learn from ;)
Steve
p.s. thought I'd ask on here as still pretty lonely in LUGE at the mo... but it'll get there in time...
I don't know about which distro as ive only used debian for a few years now. I do know about game software and other fun software though :-), tuxpaint seems quite fun and simple to use. Don't most distro's have a junior package section for stuff like this? I know Debian does but i don't know how good it is. I'm also guessing you want to just set it up and then not need to play with it much as its for someone else's kids, so Debian stable would be your best option as its very tested and stable(although testing is quite stable and alot more up to date).
Handy links:
Debian JR - http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-jr/index KDE - http://edu.kde.org/ Some of the links on this site seem abit dead but it might be helpfull - http://www.schoolforge.net/index.php
Games: TuxRacer - http://tuxracer.sourceforge.net/ - you'll need an OpenGL GFX card(don't go for an ATI Radeon newer then a 9200 as the drivers are not opensource and quite buggy) Battle for Wesnoth - http://www.wesnoth.org/ - maybe not a 4 year olds game but still fun maybe. gltron - ? - Again an OpenGL gfx card is needed. PenguinCommand - ? - Arcade classic with a tux spin. FrozzenBubble - ? - kids of all ages love this game ;). TuxTyping - ? - help them type faster
-
dennis -
Martin Collins -
Steve Purkiss