COMP 3000 2011 Report: DoudouLinux
Part 1
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
As shown in the activities menu(Figure 2) the applications are ordered by increasing difficulty.From the two year old child who discovers the mouse(Gamine and Pysycache) to more experienced users with educational suites such as Childsplay and GCompris Gamine and are both mouse-training games, aimed at different levels of experience. They hail from DoudouLinux's educational games section, which also includes language and geography titles, plus the general-purpose educational suites , each of which offers a variety of activities. The first five options diplayed in the activities menu are
There are close to fifty applications offered and they are grouped in categories.
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!
Usage Evaluation
moving the mouse over shows the instructions...sound instructions and music included incorporate plenty of interactive and tactile-experience learning tools The general games category includes standard puzzle and non-violent arcade fare, plus common card and board games. Each of the categories has its own tab in the DoudouLinux application launcher, which responds to single-clicks for better ease-of-use. Likewise, every application or game runs in full-screen mode
References
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Part 2
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Part 3
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