COMP 3000 2011 Report: DoudouLinux

Background

Doudou” is a french word for the teddy bear or blanket that children love to carry around and hug. In that context,DoudouLinux is a GNU/Linux distribution designed for young children from age two to seven.<ref name = "DoudouLinux: You know, for kids">Linux info from the source (Last accessed October 17, 2011).</ref>

It is a system that aims at making computer use as easy and pleasant as possible for children. Founded by the French Jean-Michel Philippe,its first release “Gondwana” was released in June 2011 and is based on a minimal Debian “Lenny” linux system.

DoudouLinux is officially available in 25 languages<ref name = "DistroWatch">DistroWatch (Last accessed October 17, 2011).</ref> and can be downloaded it on the DoudouLinux [www.doudoulinux.org/ homepage] as an ISO image file of approximately 693 MB in size.

Installation/Startup

Installation

The minimum requirements to run DoudouLiux are:<ref name = "Requierements">Downloads (Last accessed October 18, 2011).</ref>

256 MB memory
800 MHz processor
800×600 dots display

I used VMWare Workstation and allocated 8GB for the virtual machine and 512MB of RAM.

The installation is fairly easy and fast(around 30 seconds)[Figure 1]
No problems were encountered since there is minimal system configuration or management options and the system does not request setting up a username and password.

Startup

At boot time,there is an "Activities Menu" displayed that offers seven session options: [Figure 2]

Gamine
Pysycache
Childsplay
TuxPaint
GCompris
Mini DoudouLinux
Whole DoudouLinux

The first five options are single applications sessions while Mini DoudouLinux is a session with a reduced set of applications offered. The Whole DoudouLinux option was choosen.

Basic Operation

It is a plain drawing board where a color trail will appear when the kid moves the mouse. A left or right click will paste a star to the board. chose your computer sound output and the mouse speed!

UsageEvaluation

References