MX Linux Forum

Hello all.

I have built a children's version of MX18 Continuum. The current version (the one I'm sharing) is geared to children in grades K-2. The current snapshot is in what I'd call an alpha (or maybe pre-alpha) stage. It works for me... but will it work for you?!?! I just don't know. The current version is comprised of several unique features including:

• There are 4 xfce panels (top, bottom, left, right)

• I have elected to use Chromium rather than firefox because it is easy to create site specific browsers (most are on the top panel)

• I have stripped many applications that are not child oriented.

• I have added about 30 applications that are child oriented.

• A few of the applications I have included are web-based.

• I have customized the wallpapers (all are geared to kids and downloaded from Pixabay.

• I elected to use Parole rather than VLC, because it works better for my oldest grandson (age 5.5).

• My grandson likes the wallpapers to change. So they do. Adjust to 'taste.'

What I would like from those of you brave enough to test this are your honest comments.

• Are there applications or sites you feel should be included in a general release/ snapshot?

• What are your thoughts?

• Do you think this should include Calibre (to manage books) as well as a separate ebook reader?

Known 'problems'/ issues.

• I am unable to find a youth Wordprocessor.

• On the version I have for my grandson, I have a launcher that accesses a library of youtube educational videos for him; that is not here (due to copyright risks). They are okay to download and view, but I don't think I can provide them in this snapshot to others; you'll have to get your own.

• I have not included links to public domain children's books (like the Oz books, Dr. Doolittle, Mar Poppins, etc.). I can if there is interest I can provide a launcher to my online Dropbox libraries.

• I'm pretty certain the minimum viable screen size is 1366x768.

• Synapse is available if you like it, like I do. However, I have not mapped to a key.

• The conky needs a few tweaks, still.

A couple of final thoughts/ points:

• If anyone wants to help with this effort... please let me know what you'd like to do.

• I will add branding for and acknowledgement of MXLinux with the release.

Here is a link to the folder with the mx-edu snapshot.iso on Dropbox (be advised it is 1.8GB):

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/a8p54zth8wkh ... WNx9a?dl=0

Explore, test, but most of all I hope you enjoy.

Do you have a list of applications? Or a repo and a meta-package I could add to my existing MX boxes?
Father of a homeschooled 3rd grader and 1st grader here with two MX boxes at home that the kids use somewhat regularly, but only to play minetest right now. Mom occasionally asks about typing practice and educational things and the Debian repos are so large I don't know where to start.

Hi @BigBenAugust, all that is in the install set (snapshot). If you have either a 'spare' PC or some 30GB of "spare disk space" you can install and beat away at everything to your heart's content. I even have the browser (chrome) setup to be child safe.

I don't know for the US but there are many educational distribution in France for children, often based on Ubuntu. For example you can find

Primtux developed by teachers.

Just in case, did you make a search in distrowatch with the keyword Education?

I've done similar things for my grandchildren. I usually remove Libre Office, and install Abiword; it's quite good for older children.

I'm busy for a day or two, but will take a look as soon as I can.

Chris

Thank you @chrispop99. I look forward to your comments.

@cyrilus31 I did research on active children's distros, there is only Edubuntu actively operating in the US and their last release was in 2015 vers. 14.02 of Ubuntu. As for France (the whole EU actually), I did not discover any actively updated and enhanced distros with functioning/ functional software. I did find websites that said they provided tools, but everything I downloaded failed to work.

I, also, checked the Debian Edu program. It seems to be basically non-functioning. Even many of the 'standalone' open source tools for learning seem to be falling into disrepair.

To compensate, I have added many links using site specific browsing (SSB) with chromium. I elected to avoid ice-ssb due to difficulties it has running on our Debian base with various browsers. I figured if I had to use specific browers, I might as well go with one that allows for the creation of SSB without the overhead of having ICE-SSB. (For more specifics, you can see my article on the topic on the MX Forums at: viewtopic.php?f=9&t=47627&p=475879&hili ... er#p475879 )

As for word processing etc... I came across ooo4kids (a now defunct Open Office program). There is a site in France that says it supports the tool set however, I was unable to get either the English or German versions to run. Their last update appears to have been around 2015. Here's the link: http://educoo.org/OOo4Kids.php

I have knowledge of, and an interest in, the Raspberry Pi project. Its aim is to teach and entertain children at both a hardware and software level.

Perhaps you might get some ideas about what to include from that project?

https://www.raspberrypi.org/

Chris

How about including:

Great Websites for Kids

http://gws.ala.org/

And maybe looking at:

Kojo

http://www.kogics.net/kojo

Earl

@chrispop99 & @oldguy Thank you for the links. I'll see how I can use them.

I have been thinking (a bad idea, I know) that there's a whole class of resources that often better fit on an instructor/ teacher/ mentor/ coach Desktop. I don't know if I should integrate both the kid's and teacher's on the same setup or if I should have them separate.

Your ideas, thoughts are most welcome....

If you are interested in maintaining this version over a number of years then you might want to look into our build-iso program. We use it for building both antiX and MX. Other people have used it to make their own customized distros in the past. It builds up an iso from scratch, mostly using lists of packages to install but there is also room for customizing the theme.

I think it would be great to build this in such a way that it can be maintained over the years.

A few years back, there was quite a bit of interest, but, as with me also with others,
as their kids or condition changed they no longer had the interest. Also, like mine,
they were one-off sorts of builds that required way too much manual building.

BitJam's suggestion for the long haul is, IMHO, a good place to begin.
It offers ease of rebuilding, plus the ease of more automated modifying and updating.

BTW: I suggest either 2 versions or at least separating teachers' resources from the Kid's Desktop.
Just makes it easier to deliver to the kids.

Screenshot looks nice.
I will throw out a few thoughts, though perhaps slightly controversial, but many schools here in the U.S. use Chromebooks, and everything revolves around that with Google Docs, Sheets, and Gmail. If you were wanting to get them prepared for school those apps in the Google/Chrome sphere might be useful.
It might also be interesting to pre-load some Project Gutenberg children's books that are in the public domain. Fbreader might be worth looking at, I haven't used it in years but their mobile version is nice, so hopefully it has improved on Linux.
Kids are used to larger print in their books, so using larger fonts system-wide might be an idea.
Good job. A worthy project :)

Used to be one of the first programs I installed was mcomix, which I have replaced with yacreader as it not only reads my wonderful collection of Classics Illustrated comic books (originally obtained via torrent download), but pdf files as well. Seems to me that if you set up a printer to work with it, that geany could function as a basic word processor, but I may be wrong. And then there's the command line word processor "wordgrinder".

@BitJam Thank you. I'll definitely consider that.
But first, I'd like to get a reasonable operating base.
I certainly think there is a need for something (that isn't Apple based) in this space. I, also, don't want what I build to veer from its MX Linux roots.

@Richard
BTW: I suggest either 2 versions or at least separating teachers' resources from the Kid's Desktop.
Just makes it easier to deliver to the kids.

I tend to agree. The real challenge is with menuing. I have tried all sorts of menus, docks, launchers. In the end, those 'ultra-simple' xfce panels work best. The bottom line is I don't want the 'students' to have all the 'teacher' stuff cluttering their desktop.

@KBD
the U.S. use Chromebooks, and everything revolves around that with Google Docs, Sheets, and Gmail.

The schools where I live in Colorado are a bastion of Apples. Adding links to the Google Suit of Tools (via Internet) is no problem. I may end up there. I had really hooped to find something more 'kid friendly', though.

You might also look at Fedora's [Sugar on a stick?] version. They may have a kid friendly word processor on it--if you can get past the weird desktop navigational environment. Don't know what it's called now--been a while since I used it last.

You might also look at Fedora's [Sugar on a stick?] version. They may have a kid friendly word processor on it--if you can get past the weird desktop navigational environment. Don't know what it's called now--been a while since I used it last.
https://spins.fedoraproject.org/soas/

manyroads wrote: Wed Jan 09, 2019 4:13 pm But first, I'd like to get a reasonable operating base.

Yes, that is what we always recommend. I suggest doing it on a live system using persistence and/or live-remaster. But others are more comfortable with installed.

When Adrian makes his monthly snapshots he does it from a live system. He saves his work with snapshot but for development purposes, it is easier to save via live-remaster.

One reason I think developing on a live system is so great is because you have several ways to easily roll back to different versions. For example if you use semi-automatic dynamic root persistence, you get to choose whether you save the changes you made in this session or not. When you reach a point when you want to save things more permanently then do a live-remaster. You get to add a label/title to each remaster and you get to stash them away.

So even with no manual intervention you have the options to:

1) Save the current session, or not, with root persistence
2) Roll back to the last time you did a remaster by disabling persistence
3) Roll back to the previous remaster with the "rollback" boot option

The live system can also provide a "kiosk mode" when you deploy. So even if people make changes to system, those changes are tossed on the next reboot. You could also let people save changes under the /home directory while changes to the system are tossed. All of these features are also available when you do a frugal install.

@BitJam this all makes it sound like I probably ought to a have dedicated PC on which to do the work. I do have an old laptop, so that's no real problem.

Is there a set of documentation somewhere that details all this out. "Kiosk mode" and "frugal install" are two items with which I'm not familiar. The top 80+/-% of your note I'm clear on...

I've had a look at your snapshot; it's an interesting approach.

Perhaps if I outline what I have done in the past, there might be some food for thought for you?

I set up a machine for a household that had seven visiting grandchildren, with ages ranging from two to fifteen. I created four users; the first three on the basis of age groups, the fourth for administration. The first user profile for the youngest group had the panel auto-hidden, with large screen icons to a small selection of programs and web links. Very young children's first exposure to technology is often via parents' phone, or tables, so this approach looks familiar to them. In the UK, the best website for this age group is the BBC's 'CBeebies'. This is not available globally, but I understand there is an international version. Otherwise, Disney or Nickleodeon might have something similar; a link to one or more of those is a must. I would avoid having changing wallpaper for these users as they will be confused by the unfamiliar.

The second user group had a more conventional desktop. I used the Edit Application utility to hide a lot of stuff, and set up desktop icons for things like Scratch 1.4, and YouTube Kids.

The third user group was essentially just a normal desktop, with Scratch, and some items from the Secondary section of the Package Installer.

Good luck with whatever you end up with; schools don't do computing education well, at least here in the UK, so everything we can do is of benefit.

Chris

Hi BitJam,

I'm interesting in this but I'm not familar with the remastering options in antiX/MX, frugal install, etc. I'm creating systems in a virtual machine and make the remastering-process in the terminal with squashfs-tools, syslinux, syslinux-utils and finally xorriso for iso-build. (the old school way...). But it's o.k., it works on all Debian/Ubuntu based distributions.

I think a remaster from a live usb-stick is possible with the live-remaster tool. I don't know about the difference between the snapshot tool and the live-remaster-tool. Works this directly from a stick prepared with dd command (iso-hybrid)?

Thx for reply.

@chrispop99 Thank you for your insights. I will definitely post what I do here. I have been giving some thought to a couple of ideas
1. creating a few scripts that can be run on a base MX install to create a basic Edu setup
2. to create a script to be used on my modified base to tweak installs (an example can be viewed here) viewtopic.php?f=23&t=47804

More later.

Hopefully some of the playonlinux software titles are age -appropriate for your intended audience.

playonlinux :: Education https://www.playonlinux.com/en/supported_apps-8-0.html

playonlinux :: Games (100+ titles) https://www.playonlinux.com/en/supported_apps-1-0.html

Thank you @skidoo!

@manyroads: I was researching a lot on this topic, Children distros, searched sth for my kid. Tried them all.

If you still look into which software to add give you an advice to look into two distros, both Debian based, tons of soft, very useful:

-Spanish Picaros: fast light tons of soft, a bit kiddy weird themes and colors, icons but pretty useful, even wine and server setup, which teen needs it, if I recall even wiresrk. Weird mix of repos - Jessie, Woody, stretch and 3rd parties, installs from source. But generally great:
https://minino.galpon.org/en/descargas


-Swiss Lernstick - simply the best, developed by Swiss University's IT dept (it has 8 DE out of the box selectable at boot, faaast, 4-6Gb iso, stick works the way - consists out of system partition, cannot change, user partition, everything new saved there, if kid messes up just reformat, share partition.). Used much in Swiss and German schools, but has English and French, +10 others not so good. Nice is that when you say run KDE, all Gnome Things are disabled from menus. If you use standard version, make sure you burn to nfts not fat32, as it's more than 6.5Gig:
https://lernstick.ch/releases/
https://www.imedias.ch/themen/lernstick ... nglish.cfm

@aledie I will check them out! Thank you.

manyroads wrote: Thu Jan 10, 2019 2:37 pm @aledie I will check them out! Thank you.

You may see if you can use Lernstick repos with your MX respin, it's also Stretch. All kids related apps they use start with Lernstick-,...
-Just try all them in the menus out, make the list which ones you like. Then connect to their repo in MX, surf the
lists in Synaptic all starting with Lernstick- hundreds of them and see which are on your preferred list.
-before installing check how many dependencies it pulls, would probably not install those part of KDEedu (even though they are the best edu studf, jde framework is heavy. Also maybe dependencies related to the use of systemd....

I did look quickly and noticed most were for older children. There were also many overlapping items with what I already pulled. I will hunt more deeply to see what I can use. Thank you very much, your help is most appreciated @aledie!

manyroads wrote: Fri Jan 11, 2019 3:51 pm I did look quickly and noticed most were for older children. There were also many overlapping items with what I already pulled. I will hunt more deeply to see what I can use. Thank you very much, your help is most appreciated @aledie!

If for younger kids, you may also look into ubermix, but it's Ubuntu based, and has much less soft. Edubuntu now 2 years no new releases, an Debianedu / scolelinux. Qimo was good for the very young we talk 3-7yo, but obsolete now. There are some french ones like primatux and another one Abd something... Look in DW list under filter education

Will do @aledie!

Any thoughts about using the cute animated Tux modified cursor theme by default?

https://www.opendesktop.org/p/999794/

@stevo I did not know it existed. I'll try it out! Thanks.

Funny cursors and icons... You can really learn from Picaros, maybe copy their theme as an alternative, I hate it but kids may love it .. look here :
https://distrowatch.com/images/screensh ... icaros.png

Whoa minino (PicarOS) is huge! 3.7GB. It must be jam packed with 'goodies'. I found a skinnier version to download. I'm guessing these would run better and smaller on an antiX base than they do on Ubuntu.

@manyroads: last time I checked, picaros used Debian stable, not Ubuntu, also they have mixed repos Jessie, Woody, compiled from source, etc, 3rd parties .. it's not upgradable usually without being broken due to this, they don't recommend it... The amount of apps is amazing, some of them are too ... Which kid needs Wireshark, wine, playonlinux, Simple server out of the box ...they have

By the way Minino (Picaros is based on) claims to run on everything has a couple, like 10-15 years old, it is fast even though it is huge... I see many parallels to antiX, just the weird repo mix I hate, and yes, they should have tried antiX, then they wouldn't need to mix the repos this way, at least could use our testing repo;)

@aledie You are right about the distro base. I gave up on the "SanDiego" download (3.7GB) and now have (Quelles)- much smaller. The test is on...

@manyroads: If you want to download Children's version, you must download Picaros Diego 2017 (Children version), and not Quelles or Atabros (normal Minino versions, one older one newer). Picaros Diego is so heavy due to the kids soft, they have among others KDEedu apps...

Read the discription for each:

https://minino.galpon.org/en/descargas