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DistributionsDoudouLinux: You know, for kidsThe more Linux distributions that pop up, the more skeptical one can become of those that seek to "tailor" the platform for a specific subset of users because, too often, that tailoring process amounts to little more than applying the project leader's personal set of cosmetic preferences and default application choices. That is not the case for projects that attempt to craft a distribution for an entirely different demographic, though, such as children. Most "Linux for kids" distributions seem to target more or less the same space, but one, DoudouLinux, is taking a markedly different approach. What Linux?![[Activities]](/images/2011/doudou-activities-sm.png)
For starters, the distribution's name is derived from doudou, a French idiomatic word that seems to roughly mean "child's security blanket." But it may still elicit giggles from English speakers, particularly the extremely young users it sets out to serve. If you can get past that, however, DoudouLinux does offer a different take on the children's distribution niche. There are several active kid's Linux projects today — Edubuntu, Qimo, OLPC Sugar, Foresight Kids, etc. — but most of them focus either on classroom usage or on school-age children, meaning those old enough to be comfortable using the computer to write or do general-computing tasks. There is a gray area of course, but think mid-to-late primary school at the youngest. DoudouLinux, on the other hand, is tailored towards children in the two to seven year old age range, for use at home. The project's site explains its purpose as being a home-friendly, more educational alternative to a game console plugged in to the television. One can feel the difference in at least three ways. First, classroom-oriented distributions usually have to cope with remote management and administration issues, often using remote desktop software, and they expect the computer to be directly connected to a LAN, perhaps with access to a storage-area network. Some are even traditional "thin-client" designs. DoudouLinux dispenses with all of that. It is designed to run from live CD or live USB storage, offers minimal system configuration or management options, and the majority of its software will run without a live Internet connection. The second difference is that "school age" kids have different application requirements. As they get older, the office suite becomes more important, and what qualifies as "educational" applications becomes more specialized, such as focusing on math or science and less on games. DoudouLinux's application offerings do not include a word processor or spreadsheet at all, but incorporate plenty of interactive and tactile-experience learning tools. Third, extremely young children like those on the early end of DoudouLinux's audience simply do not have the fine motor skills to use a mouse or keyboard with standard-size icons, and those who are not reading yet might be lost entirely. Those requirements affect the choice of applications, but also require changes to the window system as well as the keyboard and mouse settings. DoudouLinux provides parents with a set of tools to configure the system settings to support a range of ages and mouse-finesse levels. Course catalogDoudouLinux's latest stable release is code-named Gondwana, from June of 2011, which you can download in CD or USB-oriented images from the project's web site. There are images in 16 languages (including two in Serbian, for both the Latin and the Cyrillic alphabets) from the stable series, and six additional languages in the "awaiting" section, which may have outstanding translation issues. There is also a PDF "Quickstart" manual in each of the stable languages. Downloading can take a while, even on a fast network connection, because the project does not have mirrors set up. The images are built for 32-bit Intel-compatible processors only; to its credit the project does an admirable job of explaining what generations of Apple hardware this includes, as well as giving a rough overview of Linux and free software concepts in general. The principle difference between the CD and USB images are that the USB images are pre-configured to use part of the flash drive as persistent storage. DoudouLinux allows a small amount of system customization that is helpful to be persistent between sessions. At the moment, DoudouLinux is intended primarily to run from such removable storage devices, although there is documentation for installing it to a hard drive as well. The roadmap indicates that future releases hope to add support for booting within Windows, a la Ubuntu's Wubi. DoudouLinux is based on a minimal Debian "Lenny" (5.x) system, with a custom, tab-based user interface. At boot time, there is an "Activities Menu" displayed that offers seven session options: the full DoudouLinux system, a "Mini DoudouLinux" session with a reduced set of applications offered, and single-application sessions for several of the applications: Gamine, Pysycache, Childsplay, TuxPaint, and GCompris. ![[Learn tab]](/images/2011/doudou-learn-sm.png)
Gamine and Pysycache are both mouse-training games, aimed at different levels of experience. They hail from DoudouLinux's educational games section, which also includes language and geography titles, plus the general-purpose educational suites Childsplay and GCompris, each of which offers a variety of activities. The other application categories include "Work" tools (a category that includes the web browser, IM software, dictionary, and calculator), "Multimedia" (which includes several music-creation applications and the Stopmotion animation tool), and general games (under "Enjoy"). The general games category includes standard puzzle and non-violent arcade fare, plus common card and board games. Each of the categories has its own tab in the DoudouLinux application launcher, which responds to single-clicks for better ease-of-use. Likewise, every application or game runs in full-screen mode, as the developers felt that window management was asking for trouble with children. Few if any of the application offerings in DoudouLinux Gondwana are not available in other Debian-derived distributions. The real customization work involved building the activities chooser and the various configuration tools, all of which are available under the GPLv3. The configuration tools are found under the "Tune" tab in the full DoudouLinux session. They allow sound, monitor, printer, and data persistence control, as well as the separate administration tools for GCompris and Pysycache, configuration of the Activity chooser, and a bug reporting tool. ![[Mouse configuration]](/images/2011/doudou-mouse-sm.png)
Although the configuration tools are intended for use by parents, they are simple to use — offering access to presets with one click. Mouse and monitor settings are usually foolproof on a modern Linux system, but there is documentation online for dealing with troublesome printers. While it is not configurable from the live system, DoudouLinux runs the DansGuardian web-filtering system in the background. DansGuardian is a keyword-based content filter, not a site blacklist, so it is advertised as doing a better job of insulating children from accidental adult content delivered through search results and other side-bands. The filter is certainly restrictive in the form offered by DoudouLinux, even blocking Google Image Search results for many innocent common words to a baffling extent (for example, "cow" is permissible, but "puppy" is not). In theory, young children will probably not spend too much time in web searches, but without parent-accessible configuration tools, DansGuardian is a distinctly "when in doubt, block it" tool. Report card timeOverall, DoudouLinux "Gondwana" is a worthy choice for families with very young children. The content that it offers is not much different than you would find in another "educational" distribution, but there is far less configuration to do, and because the system is limited in scope, it runs fast. The choice to offer it as a live-CD image only also strikes me as wise, given the inherent risks that sitting a toddler in front of a keyboard can entail. DoudouLinux cannot protect your hardware from spilled milk or the sudden disconnection of the flash drive, but then again no piece of software can. As for the applications themselves, I am probably not a good judge of young children's learning tools, since I do not have kids myself. I am a bit skeptical that the "bright colors, cartoon characters everywhere" motif is really necessary, because I see all too many kids who are capable users of their parents' smartphones. But I do think it is commendable that the DoudouLinux team included some less-common choices in its application suite, such as the music creation tools. Too many distributions' "music" category includes only an audio player; DoudouLinux gives the kids a piano keyboard and the Hydrogen drum machine. Which probably makes the volume control tool all the more critical. That said, I was a bit surprised not to find a typing tutor like Tux Typing in the menu, nor to find any webcam tools like GNOME's Cheese. The Empathy instant messenger client is included, which presumably would need to be configured by a parent. Video chat with grandparents is probably the intended usage, but it does stand out as needing a distinctly more complicated setup process. The DoudouLinux project is not resting on its laurels. The roadmap includes several technical challenges: unifying the CD and USB images into a single file with user-selectable persistence, a more flexible activity chooser, and an online tool to customize the CD image. The project's issue tracker also indicates that it plans to migrate to Debian "Squeeze" (6.x), as well as the ever-present need to add more languages and more complete translations. At least one new feature is being discussed: a parental control to limit use of the computer to specific times of day. Given the project's goal to supplant game console and television vegetative-behavior, this sounds like an even more useful control than DansGuardian. DoudouLinux's origins page says that much of the user experience design is the fruit of lead developer Jean-Michel Philippe's iterative attempts to build an interface that his own children could understand and enjoy. In that sense, it does reflect one developer's personal touch, but one based on testing and user-centric design. Better still, since the project's founding, the list of contributors has grown considerably, including two teams of university-based developers from Russia. Ultimately, the only important test of a "Linux for kids" distribution is whether or not the kids in your own house will use it, but DoudouLinux is worth a close examination for those whose children are too young to take advantage of the school-oriented builds offered by most of the competition.
Brief items Distribution quotes of the week
However, times change, people change, and I realized that time has come for
me to sail to new horizons and look for new challenges. Many things changed
in Mandriva during those 2.5 years, and it is a completely different
company from what it once was. Many people had left, and many new faces has
arrived as well during this time. But nonetheless, albeit all the
challenges, problems, disappointments and achievements, we managed to stay
alive and kicking even in cases where nobody was believing that Mandriva
would survive. But it did.
-- Eugeni
Dodonov is leaving Mandriva
Eugeni now is more or less tied with Warly in my hall of fame list for
past release engineers++, and without doubt the most successful managing
to do the previously thought-to-be impossible task of scaling sufficiently
for it impressively well!
-- Per Øyvind Karlson
In May 2011, the Beefy Miracle Fedora spin was started. The Beefy Miracle Fedora spin itself was free and open source from the start, but members of the Gnaw project were concerned with Beefy Miracle's dependence on the (then) non-GPL bun warmer, owned by a guy in a hot dog cart down the street. In July 2011, a project was started in response to this: KFCE, a different desktop not using bun warmers, but instead built on chicken fryers under the Gnaw Lesser General Public License (LGPL), a free cookery license that allows GPL-incompatible kitchen appliances to link to it.
-- Máirín Duffy
ConnochaetOS 0.9 RC1 releasedThe first release candidate for ConnochaetOS 0.9 is available for testing. "The upcoming ConnochaetOS 0.9 reached the RC1 release and should be ready for testing. All open bugs were fixed in this release and it should run pretty stable by now." ConnochaetOS is a desktop oriented distribution that aims to put modern free/libre software onto old hardware.
Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot Alpha 2 ReleasedOneiric Ocelot Alpha 2 (11.10) is available for testing. Images are also available for Ubuntu Server Cloud, Xubuntu, and Edubuntu.
Distribution News Debian GNU/Linux Debian at several conferencesThe Debian Project has announced that it will be present at several events in the coming weeks, ranging from developer-oriented conferences to workshops for users and wannabe developers. "The Debian Project invites all interested persons to attend these events, ask questions, take a look at Debian 6.0 "Squeeze", exchange GPG fingerprints to boost the web of trust, and get to know the members and the community behind the Debian Project."
delegation for the backports teamDPL Stefano Zacchiroli has appointed Alexander Wirt and Gerfried Fuchs to the Backports Team. "The Backports Team oversee and maintain the well-being of Debian's backport service that allow Debian Developers to prepare backported packages for Debian users."
Fedora Announcing FUDCon APAC 2011 in PuneJared Smith has announced that FUDCon (Fedora Users and Developers Conference) in the Asia-Pacific region (APAC) will be held in Pune, India November 4-6, 2011. Bidding is open for FUDCon APAC 2012 and FUDCon LATAM (Latin America) 2012. "FUDCon APAC 2012 will be held between March 1st and May 31st, and FUDCon LATAM will be held between June 1st - August 31st."
Gentoo Linux Gentoo Council Election Results 2011 to 2012The Gentoo Council election results are in and dberkholz, jmbsvicetto, grobian, chainsaw, ulm, betelgeuse, and hwoarang are the winners.
Ubuntu family Upcoming Ubuntu Classroom EventsUbuntu Developer Week will be happening July 11-15, 2011, followed by Ubuntu Community Week, July 18-22, both on IRC. Join others in the classroom.
Newsletters and articles of interest Distribution newsletters
Duffy: Anaconda Language & Keyboard Layout SelectionOn her blog, Máirín Duffy looks into the confusion of choosing a language and keyboard layout in the Anaconda installer used by Fedora. In the posting, she mocks up various ways that the selection screens could be improved to make it easier for non-English users to find their language and keyboard. It is Anaconda-specific, but describes problems that plague many language/keyboard choosing programs. "While Anaconda's manually-maintained lang table ties together some useful information across the languages (a default locale, keyboard layout, etc.), at least for keyboard layout selection, it could be a bit smarter providing not only a sane default, but also 'adjacent' alternatives that are more likely than most of the others. These are long lists where only a fraction of the data in the list is relevant to the user. If I choose English as my installation language, and I'm (for example) in the U.K., theres an annoying amount of difference between the two keyboards, yet as you can see in the screenshots above, the Ukranian layout is between the default and the (likely) more relevant U.K. layout. That the U.K. layout is near the U.S. one is sadly a coincidence based on the first few letters of each countrys name (thankfully were both united!)"
Hertzog: How to start contributing to Debian?Raphaël Hertzog has an introductory article on getting started as a Debian contributor. "The Debian website has a page explaining how to help Debian. While it provides no less than 10 suggestions in a daunting text-only list, it's difficult to know what to do next once you picked up something that you could do. I will try to fix this by providing concrete information for each cases in upcoming articles but in the mean time I propose you another approach to start with." (Thanks to Paul Wise)
Introducing Update Packs in Linux Mint DebianThe Linux Mint Blog introduces a new Update Manager for the Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE), which uses the "rolling release" model.
As an LMDE user you're supposed to point to 2 distinct repositories:
Wolf: DebConf13 at home? Why not?DebConf 11 will start soon in Banja Luka and that means it's time to start thinking about hosting DebConf 13. Gunnar Wolf looks at the bidding process for hosting DebConf. "I have organized DebConf in my country. It was hellish, but at the same time, it's one of my most cherished experiences. And I'm sure the same will be said by the leaders of each successive bid — It is one of the most rewarding experiences you can imagine. Next year, DebConf will be held in tropical Managua, Nicaragua. But, where will we meet in 2013? Well, that depends on you, my dear reader! Do you want to work your ass off for Debian and have utter fun? Do you want to show and share your country with this huge family of developers? Start thinking about pushing for a DebConf13 bid!" (Thanks to Paul Wise)
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol |
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