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Moving Your Kids to Linux?
"My real motivation to do this is to save money and to teach my children that sometimes the best isn't always the most expensive. Also, being the cheap bastard that I am, I'm looking at all the money we've spent on Windows XP, Office and all the games over the years, and I'm wondering if there isn't a way to slowly supplant Linux into the mix and not sacrifice my children's computer experience but at the same time save some money and teach them something new.
My requirements are simple: I would like them to run their CD-ROM based games (which are mostly Director based games from Hasbro), and I would still like them to chat with their friends and also be able to play online Flash and Shockwave based games from Yahoo and Shockwave.
I believe I'm looking at an OpenOffice situation to replace Office, I suppose that would be fine and I think would work out (they aren't required to have perfect Word compatibility, its basically type a paper, and print it). For chat we're probably OK too, because something like GAIM would be fine -- Jabber based things would also be cool.
But my real concern is the CD-ROM games and Windows based games. I can't see my 3 year-old putting a CD-ROM into the drive and expecting it to auto-load and run like it does on XP -- without issues -- even with a perfect installation of WINE, hey, maybe I'm wrong, but is there a way to have it work as good as windows?
I've thought about loading up Mandrake and getting WINE working to see if it'll work out, but I'm not sure that I should waste my time, so I thought I'd ask some readers here if they're run into this situation and if I'm just crazy for thinking that this would be the wise thing to do at the expense of my children's computing experience."
Well, since you asked for advice on raising your kids:
Move them off the screen altogether.
Nothing is going to promote the development of bad O/S interfaces more than indoctrinating young children to their quirks and bad design.
Why not encourage books and hands-on creative outlets rather than computer screens? Do you think they really need to learn about computers at age 3 and 7? Maybe the 11 year old, but I shudder to think you would try to teach your kids ANY OS at such a young age.
Let them enjoy life for awhile before they have to deal with an OS.
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If you want something that works AS GOOD AS WINDOWS... then maybe you just should use Windows.
Dont ask for trouble
...is to use both.
Have one PC for the things that they NEED Windows to run, and let them use it only for that. The other should run your free-OS of choice and related software.
As they grow older, teach them the difference, the improvements, and continue curtailing use of the Windows machine until it's just an expensive doorstop.
Very few migrations are successful when done immediatly and cold-turkey. Some are, but they are far and few between---especially when children are involved.
I think that kids of such young ages shouldn't be exposed to the politcal bickering that is involved in an OS choice. Just give them Windows for now like all the other kids, if they're using computers already, and then when they're, say 12 or 13 introduce them to Linux and any other alternative operating systems so that they will be old enough and mature enough to make such a decision on their own.
Its like with religion or politics, really young kids shouldn't just be indoctrinated in one side or the other just because thats what the parents prefer. Let them make their own un-pressured choices. Not to mention starting them off with Linux would probably set them back they'd have to use Wintel PC's at school or over at a friends house.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
If you force it on them, they might decide to not use it at all. Maybe dual boot? If the kids like Linux, just ditch Windows and move on. If not, then they can go back.
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Kids' software generally isn't the most compatible stuff around -- there's just no reason to test on multiple units or port to multiple OSs due to its limited appeal. In order to get any kid's software to work, you're goign to have to fight like crazy to get them to work under windows emulators. Does this sound like the way to teach kids there's a "better way"...by fighting for hours to get software to run just to save $100 off the cost of a win2k license?
Kids' websites tend to be about the same. I run Opera and Moz at home and when my brother comes to visit we often discover that his favorite sites -- all flash intensive with tons of cool intel/windows only games -- don't work so hot. We have the same problem with my Mac.
As for open office...i'd have to say that it's not as kid friendly as MS office, which is NOT kid friendly at all. No office suite is. I pine for the days of Bank Street Writer.
If your kids are under 12, you're probably going to meet a lot of resistance to your plan. I don't think it's worth it...especially since it's so easy to teach kids WHY linux is good when they're older. Young kids don't understand the value of a dollar nor the importance of freedom and until they do it's silly to force it on them. When they hit high school, then's where you spring your plan -- by getting them their OWN pcs, older machines running Linux, for school use.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I know, I know, you are going to complain that Mac's are too expensive but the new $999 iBook is a steal (bought one for the mother-in-law), it doesn't crash like windows xp, lets them explore open source software and there is going to be a lot more cool stuff they can do than with a linux box like iMovie -- that will keep them out of your hair for weeks and you don't need a DV camera. Evidently, the kids in Maine are going ape-manure over their iBooks.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
This is yet another demonstration of someone moving to Linux for the sake of it. You have to reboot four or five times a week?! Well that's five minutes and ten button presses.
You may have incompatibility problems with old games now, but I can assure you that they are nothing compared to the problems you'll have trying to run them through Wine.
And what about when your kids go to school? Unless they attend one in a very small minority they'll be using a different platform and will be behind the other kids.
You want to save money? Don't buy any more games - use the Shockwave resources on the internet. And you'll be fine with XP for another five years at least.
Free iPods - now in the UK!
Here's the problem as I see it: You want them to convert and you want to convert them over.
I think that, as you observed, since some things don't work as well as Windows, you'll have a problem if you try to get them converted.
My suggestion is to ensure that you can set up for them the majority of what they want, and then dual boot.
Make a point of never using XP yourself. Make sure you're seen in front of them running some really slick and attractive WM. With lots of shiney customizable things that can be tinkered with.
When they see you playing with it, they'll be interested. But if you put it in front of them and preach that "Its better! Its cheaper! Its magic sliced bread doohicky!" you won't get anywhere.
Let them have an account that'll let them do as much as possible that they could under XP, and let them tinker with it. They may tire of it, or they may be intrigued.
But either way, I bet you'll wind up with them learning less than if you tried to force them.
I don't get all the bitching about Windows stability. I think 95% of the time it's stupid users that don't know how to maintain a system (and I'm not talking about my mom or your uncle Joe either, I mean you supposed computer "experts" out there that can't keep a Win2K box running for more than a day).
My two-year old has his own PC in his room and he plays it for two-three hours a day. I never turn it off, it just runs 24-7 whether he's playing it or not. He has a library of about 30 different games, some DirectX, some Flash, some straight Windows games, even a few DOS-based games. His machine is running Win98 and it's on Dell hardware with an added ATI All-In-Wonder and Sound Blaster 16. Guess what? I can't remember the last time it crashed, froze or otherwise required my intervention (aside from dirty disks from him handling it improperly).
And this is Win98, not even Win2K or XP which are considerably more stable.
I just don't get it. All you Linux experts that can take the time to learn a Unix-based system and administer it well can't keep a Windows box running. Guess what: IT'S NOT THE OS! I grant you the 9x versions are inherently less stable than Win2K or XP, but still, if they are crashing a couple of times a day, I'm fulling willing to say that 95% of the time it's YOUR OWN DAMNED FAULT!
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
Contrary to linux belief you aren't crashign because you are using XP. You are crashing because your kids are playing old games. The solution is to get a cheap old computer for like 50 bucks at a garage sale put 98se on it and have your kids play the games on that. Then your XP machine will hardly crash at all.
Your kids will probably hate you for switchign to linux. For all my trying (dont' make fun of me) www.cartoonnetwork.com is completely incompatible with any non-windows OS. You simply can't play cartoon orbit ctoons or gtoons without windows. I even tried a wine/mozilla combo that lied to the website and pretended to be IE. No dice.
Another solution is to get your kids a console gaming system. A new one. They will spend so much time playing that that they will use the pc less and less for those games that crash it and more and more for flash/web based stuff, messenging, and paper writing.
Linux is not your answer. It would be nice if it was, but it isn't.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
I've often thought about how my own computer history affected my computer 'development', if you will. Personally speaking, my history is this:
- Osbourne (age 6-8)
- Commodore 64 (age 9-13)
- Commodore Amiga (age 13-17)
- and various Macs since.
I have a point here, stay with me. The earliest machines, the Osbourne and C64, had no GUI to speak of. If you really liked computers, and were technically inclined, you still had to dance circles to get the stupid C64 to do anything impressive. You had to learn the quirks, watching the behaviour of the disk drive LED (anyone remember that constant flashing red light? that meant BAD). In short, you had to really know what you were doing.
Amigas, too, just by virtue of the fact that it was the BeBox of the 80s. No support = gotta be resourceful.
If you could make those old computers do what you wanted to, consistently, then you basically had passed your trial-by-fire. You were a geek. More importantly, you were a geek that knew why computers act a certain way. The kicker is that you would really fly if given a computer that was half-capable. So, in moving your kids to Linux, you have an interesting experiment before you. If your kids are technically inclined, it might be one of the bigger favours you could do for their education. If not, however, I suggest you move them back - at least to a GUI - after a certain period of time. Some kids are nerds, some aren't. It's stupid to force a non-nerdy kid to compile stuff. If that kid happens to enjoy tinkering... you've opened up a whole new world, and possibly career, down the line.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
I've noticed a lot of people saying "Well, I put Linux on my mom's computer," and now someone wants to make their kids use Linux?
Your kids might grow up to be great sysadmins if you do that. But if they're aren't computer lovers, your kids will just end up having an adversarial relationship with computers, and another generation of technophobes will be born.
While it's true that kids are flexible, and won't have much trouble figuring out the differences between the Windows or Mac they use at school and the Linux box at home, cutting your kids off from games, homework assignments, etc just because you like Linux so much is a bit of a rash decision. Don't you want the best for them?
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Wow, that seemed a little angry, but I for the most part agree with you. I have an XP machine, that only hung when i was overclocking, and a 2k machine thats been running IIS/SQL Server for over a month without a crash (to be honest I don't think its ever crashed, i usually turn it off eventually due to a reboot or whatever).
At the same time, I take very good care of my machines. I keep them clean, make sure no rouge software is found on them, etc. Now maybe this is more time than some people are willing to put in, at the same time I've spent a good couple of hours trying to install Linux without stable success.
Now to the kids topic... i think a Mac OS is a good idea if you refuse to use Windows anymore. Their older software might not run (though i think it might under powerpc or whatever) and I know that Mac OS is a very user-friendly OS.
I've got my kids running Linux (Red Hat 8) on laptops (ages 12, 12, 14) for both school and home.
OpenOffice works fine for all their school work, and they connect fine to the school's wireless LAN. They can connect to the shared drive in school to save work, thanks to Samba.
However, web sites are a different matter. Linux doesn't do Director so they all were pissed about not being able to do much with Nick.com, Disney.com, CartoonNetwork.com, etc. until I got them all CrossOver Plugin and installed the Shockwave Director plugins.
Fortunately RealPlayer, Xine and MPlayer are good enough for playing all media content. This will be 100% true when Mplayer makes the latest install easier and handle Quicktime Sorensen better.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
then maybe you just should use Windows.
What version? OP wants something as stable in general as Windows XP but which runs older games as well as Windows 98 did.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I'm not sure of the mathematical words for the proof, but it goes like this:
Hmmm... the ages of the kids can be expressed as x, x+4, and x+8.
For x greater than 3:
x+4 mod 3 = x+1 mod 3
X+8 mod 3 = x+2 mod 3
Clearly, it's impossible for x, x+1, and x+2 to all NOT be divisible by three... The only way that x, x+4, and x+8 can all be prime is when x=3, which is kinda the "trivial" case.
There's no way to avoid hitting a multiple of three somewhere along the way.
The best computer you can give to your kids is one that powers on, boots, and doesn't do much else. Kids are really, really smart.
I'm rebooting this machine probably four and five times a week
This smacks of an installation problem, or something specific to your hardware. With Windows 2000 and Windows XP I've never had trouble like this. It's rock solid. I'd check all the usual culprits first, like video card drivers.
You might also consider turning off your computer at night and when the kids are at school, etc. With the amount of power a modern PC uses, it's always a win to turn it off when you're not using it for an extended period. (This used to be a point of debate, but no longer.)
A friend of mine had an accident which is a perfect answer to your question. His car fell into a reservoir. Water pressure from the outside was so strong he couldn't open the door. The water shorted his electric system and the windows stopped working.
He's a lucky guy. The water was shallow enough, so his car hit bottom before he drowned. Eventually, someone came and broke one of his windows with a stone.
Power windows are just like GUIs. People who have them feel superior to people who don't have them. But GUIs, just like power windows, stop working in conditions where hand cranks and consoles may save your life.
Seriously. It'd be like being a kid with parents don't believe in sugar. Do the little tikes really need to be indoctrinated so soon?
The perfect kid rig is the newest version of IE, newest version of every macromedia plug-in and a tray full of closed source IM clients. Anything else is losing functionality.
Don't worry, they're just about old enough to start their first warez server and we all know the dirty open source road that leads down.
That is the way. Never take away functionality before you have replaced it. Web browsing works better under Linux now than it does under Windows so you can kill that first. Games and all that can stay with the old doze machine, but you would be amazed at how much more stable windoze is when you don't let it see the internet. Rebuild the old box one more time and then let it die as it will. Then you can take your time learning how to do things in Linux like singing dancing and games.
This is how I got myself and my wife off Windoze. We have one windoze computer left and it's blind to the netword. We boot it every now and then to write CDs. We don't miss it, and it's lasted longer than any other windoze PC I've ever built. When we install something and that program breaks another, the blame is clear cut. My computers are stable and do the things we want. You don't need M$ only services.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
In my experience, very young people typically have few problems learning to use Linux, because they often aren't accustomed to using something else.
I didn't really start using a computer until my freshman year at college; I started out using Windows 98. The following summer I installed Red Hat 6.2, and I ended up using it full time w/few complaints. Interestingly, all my friends who thought the change was "pretty hardcore" had all grown up using Windows. Since I had really nothing to switch from, the transition was pretty easy.
Since your children are all relatively young, I don't imagine Windows is the only language they'll ever be able to speak, so by all means let them use Linux while it's easy for them. If you want them to play their old games, then run a dual-boot until they outgrow that software, and just stop buying new versions of Windows!
Anyhow,... I have 2 decent games boxes for my kids running windows, but I've also provided both vnc and shell (PuTTY) interfaces to my server and I'm encouraging my son (the girls just are NOT interested at this stage) to explore. Little progress so far, but he's at least poked around a bit.
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For great justice!
I'm not sure which is funnier - the troll of an original question ("I want Windows, only not") or the volley of "Keep using Windows" advice that followed.
You want to know why MS has a monopoly? You want to know why Linux isn't ready for primetime? Go back and read over the responses here. Even the most gung-ho Linux responses amounted to "This will be broken, these other things will require a lot of fiddling, some things may work, more or less, out of the box, and your children will be social outcasts because they don't use the same OS as everyone else."
Maybe our next milestone should be to make Linux kid friendly, where "kid" is NOT someone capable of recompiling and tweaking source code. A free alternative is a lot less compelling when it doesn't work as well as the paid options, and technical superiority amounts to a hill of beans when Linux is a painful experience for normal families.
Meanwhile, chalk me up on the "Keep using Windows" side. It's not exactly a case of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," but Windows is probably less broken than Linux in this situation.
MC
Kid friendly software is not a "straw man." It's just that adults misunderstand what a kid needs to learn software.
It's not big, pleasant buttons that make a software package kid friendly. It's familiar terms and words. When a kid wants to write a book report on dolphins, it does no good to present them with the option to create a new template, "legal preceding" or fax. When they want to see what something looks like, offering them an outline or master view doesn't help them. Furthermore, children think VERY linearly...programs that reformat their work based on paragraph settings after they've already typed it and tried to change the stats further down the page are just confusing.
Incidentally, these are all signs of bad programs for adults, too.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
My 11yr old son has never used Windoze at home (I stopped using M$ products
back in the era of Win 3.0.)
Executive Summary:
* CD-ROM Games - forget it. There are home-grown games
but they are rarely of commercial quality. WINE doesn't
do DirectX - so unless you are prepared to pay for WINE-X
you can't play Windoze games - period. Even Wine-X won't
play more than a handful of Windoze games well.
* Online Games/Flash/Shockwave - no problem. Use Mozilla.
* For *everything* else - Linux is better than Windoze..and
it happens to be free.
Conclusion:
Buy them a GameCube for games - keep the PC for serious
stuff. I don't think that's a bad idea anyway - while they
are doing homework, there is no temptation to take time out
for a game - and that's "A Good Thing".
www.sjbaker.org
While that may have been posted to be funny, you are really just proving my point. A lot of people would use copy and paste for this project, but this is still not really using the computer for its purpose. You are still doing the work, just manually copying your original work. The only thing that seperates computer "gurus" from the rest is this mindset.
I am a human. I am not well suited to doing simple things to data more than once. I am using a computer, a device that is.
-twb