Introducing DoudouLinux
Hello there!
I'm the founder of the project DoudouLinux [1], a young live distro for
kids, and I'd like to introduce our project to the Debian Derivatives
community since we are willing to join your initiative. To say the truth
we had looked at the derivatives initiative months ago and, after a kind
discussion started by Paul Wise, we are now diving into it! So what is
DoudouLinux?
DoudouLinux is of course based on Debian and uses Debian Live tools. It
focuses on providing an environment as easy to use as a gaming console,
for children aged from 2 and in the children's language natively. Our
first official release is supported in 15 languages [2] while
translation into 8 new languages [3] has started after the release was
out.
DoudouLinux offers [4] the traditional Linux educational games, plus
multimedia applications, applications for work, as well as entertaining
games (Linux has to be fun too!). There is an extensive review on LWN
[5]. We are currently moving toward digital contents because we think
that not only children have to understand that computers are fully
programmable and should obey their owner only, but they also have to
learn how to use digital contents and moreover how to create them (in
order to publish them online later, with a cool license ;) ).
On the technical side our philosophy is to keep stuck to Debian as much
as possible. We are then trying to patch very few packages and to avoid
including non-officially maintained software. Due to the use of a live
system build process, our changes to the standard Debian flavor are
generally not available in patched packages (it is much easier to put a
modified file in the live tree than to make a package – sorry). Our
changes are of different nature:
* improved translations, of course, including icon files
* bug fixing (oh yes, there are still few bugs in Debian apps –
nobody's perfect)
* system configuration changes, for example we had to move
squid/dansguardian service start into ifup/ifdown scripts
* feature addition, for example a small patch in lxlauncher provides a
per-user application menu
We are also planning to bring more important changes to lxlauncher, in
order to merge lxpanel icons into it or to be able to place icons
differently in tabs. Finally we are going to move from Lenny to Squeeze
and to port our distro to the ARM platform. Not to tell a word about
artwork, graphics or music.
As you can see we have many ideas in many areas. We started to discuss
with Paul in order to know how to get closer to our father project
Debian. Unfortunately we are currently lacking of volunteers due to our
youth (we blew our first candle last month) so don't worry if you don't
see us active in the derivatives during the coming weeks. We are highly
interested into participating indeed.
Cheers,
Jean-Michel Philippe
[1] http://www.doudoulinux.org/
[2] http://download.doudoulinux.org/
[3] http://identi.ca/doudoulinux
[4]
http://www.doudoulinux.org/web/english/documentation-7/applications-13/index.html
[5] http://lwn.net/Articles/450503/
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