Moving Your Kids to Linux?

telecaster asks: "My kids are aged 11, 7 and 3. All of them are computer savvy. They use the computer for basically three things: Games, writing papers and chatting with friends, as well as browsing sites that are frequented by children their age (Nick, Cartoon Network, How Things Work, Yahoo!Kids, and others). All of this is supervised and watched by my wife and I -- we don't use any parental filters since we've found they just don't work, and it's just better to keep a watchful eye anyway. I would like to move them off Windows XP and introduce them to something less expensive (free) and more reliable. I'm rebooting this machine probably four and five times a week, not to mention the forever problem of lockups and hangs which seem to happen during the times where the 3 year-old is using the machine. I know the crashes are mainly due to the older games that the kids play which are not totally compatible with XP, but hey, they USED to run just fine under Windows98."

"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."

Comments

Linux + TV Tuner card + PS2 console

[BroadbandBradley]

you messed up bigtime by ever letting them use windows, BillG likely has already been granted thier eternal souls in a click through agreement of some sort.

get a PS2 -( Sony Playstation game console that is) and let your kids know that windows is there to steal thier souls and corrupt them to the dark side.

I haven't told my kids about Microsoft yet because they're too young to know of such evil things, but you have some damage control to do. Best you can hope for is converting your kids so thet BillG doesn't get your grandkids soul at a later date.

you've already got a lawyer

[ameoba]

You obviously have a lawyer already, since you managed to reach a settlment with the GPL violator, why not continue to use his services? Slashdot can't really give you good legal advice, what we -can- help you with is comming up with the technical solutions to actually achieve what your lawyers decides is the best course of action.

In general, I'd avoid any solution that relies on NDAs. There are too many ways that too many people could get hamstrung and/or tied up in court for too long by them, especially if any of the commercial developers consider themselves in competition, not to mention what they could do to you in the future (of course your future work is ALWAYS going to be suspect, if you ever venture into any of the areas covered by stolen code).

At first thought, I'd say expect the developers of the commercial add-ons to follow your site, and stand up and go over the code, identifying their code. The problem being that you'd potentially be giving competetors eachother's code, potentially allowing both of them to steal the competitor's code AND sue you for giving their code to their competitor. Of course, any halfway decent lawyer should easily spot things like this.

Perhaps what you need to do is pull out sections of code that you would like to add to the main codebase and then post small sections, which should be enough for the owner to identify the code, but not enough to give away any significant functionality. If a developer can send you the code that follows it, throw that module away. To me, a 90 day period would seem sensible since, as I mentioned earlier, any commercial developer that fails to check your site/release-notes/mailing-list in that long isn't serious. Again, the lawyer can figure out the finer points here.