mhall119's Journal: Is Linux Ready? The Toddler Test

This is the first in what I hope becomes a series of stories about people I know switching to Linux. This one comes from a recent adventure of setting up a game-station for my kids (3 and 4 years old). Now granted they will not be playing hardware-intensive games, or even cutting-edge games, I think it's as good a real-world test as any for our favorite OS.

The Setup:
Frankenstein-ed Dell Dimension, circa 2004, with a 2Ghz processor and 512MB Ram, 40GB hard drive, nVidia GeForce 2 graphics and SoundBlaster audio cards. Given that I use Ubuntu, and I already have an 8.04 LiveCD on hand, that was my choice to install. Installation was easy and straight-forward, I won't go into detail about it other than to say it was uneventful. After installing, the first thing I wanted to do was to pull updates over the internet, but the system was not setup anywhere near a network jack. To get around this, I configured Ubuntu to allow remote-access to the user's desktop. I also configured GDM to automatically log into the one user account setup. After relocating the PC tower to within patch cable distance of my switch and starting it up, I commandeered my wife's laptop and connected to it via VNC, and was able to download and install all available updates.

Configuration:
Since my kids won't be needing a full Gnome desktop, I decided to strip away the two default panels, and instead use just over-sized launcher panel at the bottom of the screen. Originally the panel included Gnome Menu button and application launchers, I soon realized that a window-switcher has become a necessity for me, and I really didn't like offering the Gnome Menu to toddlers. So instead I created a smaller top-panel to contain the menu, task switcher, and clock applets, and set the panel to auto-hide. Since my son is learning to read, I wanted to make on-screen text easy for him to see and read, which was easily accomplished by changing the font DPI. My next order of business was to make the mouse cursor easier for them to find, which involved switching away from the default cursor to a scalable one, and maxing it's size. Setting the background image to a photo of our trip to Disney World completed the desktop's transformation into a "Kid Computer".

The Open-source Games:
Since this was supposed to be a play computer for toddlers, I installed gCompris and Tux Paint, which my son has played with before on my workstation so I already knew he liked them. I also installed Child's play, which seemed similar to gCompris. I installed Tux Type and Tux Math because, even though my kids are probably not old enough to play them yet, they do have older friends who come over from time to time that might. Again the installation was easy and uneventful, thanks to Synaptic.

The Off-the-Shelf Games:
Some time ago my wife had picked up a "Reader Rabbit" game pack, which included several educational games including familiar characters (Blue's Clues, Dr. Suess, etc). These games were windows-only, but a quick browsing of Wine's application database said that they should work. After installing wine from the Ubuntu repositories, I ran the Blue's Clues setup.exe files on the install CD, and every ran without a problem. Adding a link to the desktop launcher proved problematic because the game's file names included an apostrophe (in Blue's), which the panel launcher applet didn't like. Instead of figuring out an acceptable escape character (\' didn't work), I just re-named the game files. This was the time I ran into a problem during this setup.

Next came a "My Little Pony" game recently purchased for my daughter's birthday. Again this was a Windows only game, and actually required OpenGL and DirectX 9 support (it said it would install it if you didn't have it). Installing through wine was no problem, I wasn't prompted to install DX9, but the game play itself was quite sluggish, way too sluggish for an impatient 3 year old. I was going to write this off as a lost-cause, either because of Wine or my older GeForce2, until I decided to check the driver I was using and discovered that it was the open-source nv driver. Since the GeForce2 isn't on the Compiz white-list (even though I have run Beryl on it), it seems that the Ubuntu installer opted for the open-source driver instead of the OpenGL capable binary-blob. Installing the latter got the game running smoothly. Adding the launcher to the panel caused some errors because the game wanted to be running from the install directory. To get around this I created a shell script to change directories and launch the game, problem solved.

Once everything was ready, I showed the kids how to turn the computer on, showed them the game icons in the bottom panel, then stood back and let them explore it for themselves. I'll post the results in my next entry.