[plug] Linux in _home_ education

[David Griffiths]

>Adding some more to a private response I gave to Leon earlier, the
>thread of which is here:
>

You touched on some good points there Bill. One of the things that you made
me think of too is that the suitability of linux probably varies with age
to some extent. My kids _really_ struggled getting a password in correctly
at age 6 (due to lack of keyboard skills) for example, but now do it
comfortably at age 8 (yep, they're twins). Now they use linux more than
windows (mainly because they like playing Xsoldier at the moment.) and are
quite happy firing up games from the command line. At highschool level, I
think most kids would be mature enough to appreciate and learn from the
differences between windows and a more sophisticated OS like linux.

The sheer volume of educational software available for windows and
corresponding sparseness of such software for linux is also another hurdle
for the parent to overcome unless they're clever enough to configure
wine/win4lin/vmware. (The emulation path has some decent advantages over
native windows though through it's inheritance of linux's multiuser
capabilities.)

cheers,

Dave



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  David Griffiths                             griffith at environ.wa.gov.au

  Air Quality Management Branch
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