Good stuff for kid's?

[x]

Soon I can skip Windows completely - what a relief!
But my poor kids? 2 girls, 7 & 9 years, they have lots of educational programs & games for Win98 but I can't find anything for Linux!
Anybody know where to find it?
They are rather fed up with Windows (is this really correct English?), tired of crashes, restarts, strange dialog boxes just popping up .. well, I guess you all know what I mean.
Kid's really are worth the best - and they LOVE that Penguin!

[jman_77]

haha :) Well, if nothing else you may be able to set it up to boot straight into X and run WINE behind the scenes. *shrug* just a thought.

[x]

Could be, but I have heard a little too much about WINE not being very reliable - actually this isn't very strange since MS doesn't publish anything about their so called OS (Win98 is definitely not an OS, it's a virus)

There is not much idea running Linux + WINE if it isn't stable.
So thanks for trying, but anybody got some good links?

[Strike]

I don't know about educational programs, but there's a distro aimed specifically for the young ones:

:cool: Debian Jr. :cool:

If you've got a Debian system now, just apt-get install task-junior and you should be good to go.

[twofoolish2b]

Use VMware, and run all of you Windows programs in Linux.

[Strike]

x
http://www.codeweavers.com - Codeweavers WINE, about as newbie friendly as anything I've seen

[BawheeD]

Maybe you know this, maybe you dont, but since from your post it seams you havent thought about it(you didnt say so). I shall give you a breif explination of what i would do in your situation.
Format your hard disk, and repartition it with for example:
your disk = 10gigs
partition1 = 5gigs
partition2 = 5gigs
These would need to be primary partitions i belive.
just use FDISK to delete the olds ones and add the above.
Next boot off your windows CD, and install on one of the partitions.
This gives you a clean install of windows (no more errors for a while), this would be for your kids, and their games. Plus leaves another 5 gigs to play in for linux.
Just boot off the linux boot medeium and install on the other side of the partition.
Hey presto you now have two Operating systems on one hard disk.

One other thing, is you may concider win2k pro, because you basicly dont get the gay messages anymore, but it means NT drivers, and maybe not all the games.

Sorry if you knew this allready, just ignore it and dont take it as an insult, but as i say, you made no mention of it, and its what id do.

- Baw

[Malakin]

Try doing a search for "educational", "kids" or "children" on freshmeat.net or sourceforge.net
Never tried it but tux typing for example looks cool: http://sourceforge.net/projects/tuxtype/

[MandK_10]

I have posted before how I keep windows running on my machine (got a lot of slack). I have a win98 partition that the kids use (son 5, daughter 8, stepdaughters 13 and 15). They never get bluescreens or strange dialog boxes. If you run preventative (predictive) maintenance on the win98 partition you should have little problems with the windows partition. You may however have problems with the software you are using. Just a thought.

Mike

[x]

Lot's of suggestions, thanks!

The main problem for the kids is that windows isn't stable. I know that on some machines Win98 runs rather well, if you reinstall once every 6 months or so it could work - but then you never know!

Running Wine, as I mentioned earlier, is not a good solution as I've heard it isn't very stable. The kids would have the same problems but now under Linux..
WMWare - rather costly and then, I'd just be running 2 OS's at the same time, don't see that this can make Win98 more reliable.
Also I want to leave Windows completely, if I had done that earlier I wouldn't be stuck with a winmodem, several Win98 games, 20 CD's kid's stuff for Win98 etc..

That sourceforge gave me a lot! Ther's one site I'll return to, thanks Idealego!

But I will also install Debian to test this junior distro. Just 2 questions - please excuse me, I know it has been asked before but 1) I am lazy & 2) I have very little spare time:

* I have Debian 2.2, not on bootable CD. I don't find anything about how to install it?
I have 4 directories: Binary_I386, Contrib, Main, Source. Should there be something more, if not how do I install it?
* I already have SuSe 7.1 on my computer, & not too much space left. Couuld SuSe & Debian use the same /usr & /opt? (Considering the rather big differences between these distro's.) I have to try things on my machine before I install it on my kid's box.