IMHO, most laptops are too fragile or dangerous for kids (small parts, heavy weight) and too expensive for parents. And they are not ergonomic - small keys and touchpads are not suitable for children, regular mice / keyboards are better.
Then my son was about 2 years old, I just installed for him an old computer (PIII 800MHz) with Edubuntu.
Edubuntu comes with excellent GCompris education suite, which also contains activities suitable for 2-3 year old children.
Make sure to pick a small enough mouse, and simple keyboard (without all small multimedia keys, in other words, old one).
- it's easy to do upgrades (on RedHat, don't know about others) I do it several years from remote location, and only once it failed because of bad LILO configuration...
- you always know which file belongs to which package
- you can verify checksums of all installed files
- dependencies is not a problem - it's a solution to the problem
- it's simple to locate needed package from distro
- if you're trying to install someone else package, you'll better to get sources, and build rpm package youself
- I agree that it is bad idea to distribute rpm binaries only, so best is to post tar.gz source, rpm packages are optional (it is good if source includes.spec file)
- and if you don't like dependencies, you can always use --nodeps:)
P.S. When I start using linux in 1995, first distribution I installed was Slackware, and after one year I switched to RedHat.
Slackware is a good, but you have same dependency problems (and you even don't know which package to install in case of such problem, lets say then installing some binary package). It also much harder to upgrade it....
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IMHO, most laptops are too fragile or dangerous for kids (small parts, heavy weight) and too expensive for parents. And they are not ergonomic - small keys and touchpads are not suitable for children, regular mice / keyboards are better. Then my son was about 2 years old, I just installed for him an old computer (PIII 800MHz) with Edubuntu. Edubuntu comes with excellent GCompris education suite, which also contains activities suitable for 2-3 year old children. Make sure to pick a small enough mouse, and simple keyboard (without all small multimedia keys, in other words, old one).
Yeah, there is couple of problems with RPM, but:
.spec file) :)
- it's easy to do upgrades (on RedHat, don't know about others) I do it several years from remote location, and only once it failed because of bad LILO configuration...
- you always know which file belongs to which package
- you can verify checksums of all installed files
- dependencies is not a problem - it's a solution to the problem
- it's simple to locate needed package from distro
- if you're trying to install someone else package, you'll better to get sources, and build rpm package youself
- I agree that it is bad idea to distribute rpm binaries only, so best is to post tar.gz source, rpm packages are optional (it is good if source includes
- and if you don't like dependencies, you can always use --nodeps
P.S. When I start using linux in 1995, first distribution I installed was Slackware, and after one year I switched to RedHat.
Slackware is a good, but you have same dependency problems (and you even don't know which package to install in case of such problem, lets say then installing some binary package). It also much harder to upgrade it....