Doudou – Linux distribution for kids

Linux for kids?

I took my kids to a fast food place and in this location, the play area had two table top CRT touch screen system. One was working, and one was stuck in a boot loop, so I saw that it was booting Linux.

The other one was fully booted, and came up to a touch menu with a lot of touch screen kids games. Since I had some older machines to play with, I decide to try that at home for my 4 and 6 year old. I did some looking around and found some distros for kids, for play and learning.

The one I really liked is Doudou Linux, said to be for ages 2 and Up.
If you are already running a major linux distro, then look for the GCompris software suite. This is a suite of over 100 games and activities for children aged 2-10, and is usually found in the repositories of most major distros.

Lastly, for those of you who have some older 1GB+ USB sticks just sitting around, combine the children’s distro of choice with the ease and safety of booting a fresh system from a USB stick by using LinuxLive USB Creator.

This awesome piece of open source software helps you create a portable, bootable and virtualized USB stick running Linux. It offers to download a bunch of major distros for you or you can point it to a .ISO or .IMG file and it will try to get it working from USB Boot.
It also gives you the option to leave a bit of the USB drive and use a “persistence mode,” which allows you, with some distros, to save your data and install software.

Time to put that old PC and CRT monitor to use, and have some fun with Linux.