The kids inherited the old Dell Pentium III when the hard drive started acting strangely and the wife needed something she could depend on. The Dell originally came with Windows ME, and there was no way *that* was going to fly for the kids - how could I in good conscience, put that POS on a machine that kids will be fumbling with? Even if we somehow avoid the zillion virii targeted at insecure operating systems like ME, they will most certainly break something since as a normal user they have rights to delete even critical components of the OS. Legal options for a more up to date Windows are non-existent: even if I shelled out hard cash for a more up-to-date Windows, there is no modern Windows that will run decently on this (relatively ancient) hard-ware. There is only one serious answer: ubuntu Linux!

ubuntu is a fork of Debian which has a long and respected history as a Linux distribution. The reason for the fork was mainly to offer faster updates, with the goal of releasing a major update to the OS every 6 months. ubuntu is made to be user-friendly, aiming at offering an easy to run, easy to use Linux system that will work decently on old hardware as well as new, and provide a cutting edge Linux out to the masses with regularity. So far, their strategy has worked - Dell (and several other PC manufacturers) now offer ubuntu as an option when you buy a new PC, though they all bury the offering behind loads of Windows offerings.

I knew the kids could deal with a Linux machine already since I was running edubuntu on an old laptop for a while and they were allowed to run some things on it. Being young, the kids haven’t had time to develop the attachment to the Windows paradigm that so many adults have. I count myself lucky that I was around back when the personal computer revolution first got going, and was able to use lots of different types of machines before the PC became the defacto standard. My favorite remains the Atari ST which did windows before they called them windows. I knew also that they had accumulated a bunch of games (mostly crappy) when they had access to the Windows machine, and that they would invariably be pining to play them at some point.

Installing ubuntu (this was done several months ago now) was a breeze. All you have to do is download the ISO image, burn it on a CD (if you don’t know how to burn an ISO image, this step might stall you for about 10 minutes of Googling), and boot the machine from the CD (another 10 or 15 minutes of education if you’ve never booted from CD before). You’re left with a functional operating system that looks only slightly different from windows, but has a boat load of software at the ready, and is probably already on the internet and ready to use. If you like it, you can install it on the PC permanently (it will run a butt load faster than running it off a LiveCD) by double clicking the “install to HD” icon and following the prompts. Comparing an ubuntu install to a windows install is like night and day. You can pretty much walk away from the machine for awhile, come back and have a fully functional ubuntu box. Unless you do a LOT of upfront work to create a slipstreamed Windows install disc, you’re gonna be clicking on crap and OKing things for hours.

There are so many robust programs available to install (free) through the Synaptic package manager, there is just no comparison to Windows. ubuntu comes stock with a full office suite to just name one - scoff if you want, it is NOT Microsoft Office, but it’s damn close. For most folks it’s way more than they will ever need out of an office suite. Caveat - I use Microsoft Office Pro at work all the time (Access and Excel mainly) and those two programs are just slick as hell. I also use mySQL/phpmyadmin/Excel all the time, and Access is just faster for some tasks. It also can’t do everything MySQL can do, so it works both ways. In any case, the sheer volume of free apps availble to you with Linux (and ubuntu in particular) is overwhelming. If you can’t find an application to do what you want to do you aren’t looking hard enough. As for kids software, there is a huge number of apps that are by far better, more wholesome, more educational, not filled with advertisements, better designed, less likely to break, more user friendly, the list goes on… Tuxpaint (tip: set fullscreen=yes in the .tuxpaintrc file so that kiddies deal with the interface only and don’t accidentally open other programs), TuxType and Tuxmath are just the tip of the iceberg. They also love all the little puzzle games that are available, as well as real challenges like GNU chess, and qGo. Games like Globulation2 offer a nice twist on the original Warcraft RTS gaming experience, while Armagetron is great for a tron-like snakes battle game. If they would rather use pbskids.org or noggin.com or webkins.com for their gaming fix, ubuntu ships with the latest Firefox and installing flash was a snap (just go to a flash page that is kind enough to offer a button to install the plugin). Shockwave still doesn’t work on Linux, so you do have to explain to the kiddies that there are a few games that will not function on PBSkids.org. There are also some really great board games like Pioneers (a Settlers of Catan clone) which offers a server so you can play against a bunch of friends, and offers AI opponents if you have no friends that care. Nothing beats Stellarium to keep you looking up (and it’s free for Windows too). I was even able to copy over some VOB files from a DVD one of the kids wanted to watch (using Filezilla from my machine) and ran it using VLC player (the old Dell doesn’t have a DVD Rom drive).
Of course, it’s always possible they might enjoy nethack too, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Since this is a modern operating system, you can’t do anything to the core OS files without admin privileges, and even the admin runs as a normal user until you need to do something special, then it will just ask for the admin password. Assuming you are in the sudo users group and actually have permissions to ‘change to root’ to do the task, you can just type in the password and ‘become root’ for that specific task. Something I have always *hated* about windows, that you basically had to log off to do real admin tasks. Also, you can set permissions per user, so each kid has a logon and certain things they can do. With a little ingenuity you can block the internet completely, or just allow certain sites. I haven’t bothered to do this yet since they are only allowed to use the machine when we are present (it’s set up in the main part of the house) and can see what they are doing. This will definitely be something I implement soon however.

The problem with windows games. There is nothing that is going to make ubuntu magically become Windows in order to run all your Windows software if that is important to you, however - installing Wine may get you pretty darn close. I was able to download trial versions of the Windows games by Pop-cap: Mummy Maze and Alchemy (two of the kids favorites) , double click on the exe files on the desktop, and the install just worked leaving me with an icon on the desktop to run the windows programs. Double clicking them launched the program, changed the screen size to what the windows program wanted it to be, and I had full music and sound effects for both games. Lots of kiddy smiles for that one! I *did* need to go into the Wine config and select Alsa instead of OSS sound, but once I did that it all worked great. Another windows program was not so happy with ubuntu. I still think I will be able to work around it, but there is some kind of CD protection enabled on it that is looking for the disc in the CDROM and not seeing it. The game isn’t so great that it’s really worth any more work on it, but it did present a challenge so I might try again anyway.

I’ll leave this story with today’s anecdote which is what got me writing this: my eldest was busy playing Alchemy, but had left the sound on really loud. I wanted to listen to Christmas music while we talked in the next room, so I yelled at her to turn it down. She said she couldn’t because the game was running in full screen and she couldn’t see any way to control the sound without stopping and she’d be done in a little while anyway… I didn’t have to wait. Since the machine is running Linux, I ssh’d into the box, ran alsamixer and turned the master volume down myself. Try that on a windows box. This also works well for when they refuse to get off the machine and get ready for bed. All of a sudden the machine will close all windows and power down. “I told you to turn it off and get ready for bed!” … mwha-haa-haa, the evil admin chuckles to himself at the command line.