Great news from Doudoulinux team, they have released the version 1.1 of their project.
For the peopel that don’t know what’s doudoulinux, this it is not a new distribution, but a Debian tailor-made for children, the designer Jean-Michael says that is usable by children two years old.
And in fact by starting this live meta-distro you get a rich and colorful menu from which childrens can choose what to play or learn.
From the release page
Thanks to the involvement of many new contributors, it is available in 25 officially supported languages instead of 15 previously :). The 10 new languages are Czesh, Danish, German, Hungarian, Latvian, Malay, Norwegian (Bokmål), Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal) and Telugu.
This release also brings minor fixes and a new tool to easily set the user name on the local network – for Empathy, the instant messaging application. A summary of the changes is in the page What’s new in the latest release?. The full list of changes is available in our page Release notes.
The distribution include a lot of useful programs and applications for children, but that can be useful also for adults like:
Epiphany-browser : This is a web browser based on Mozilla Firefox technologies. It features ad-blocking and popup blocking for a better web browsing experience. On the other hand it is not compatible with the Firefox plugins system. However it is lighter, simpler to configure and faster than Firefox, this is why DoudouLinux integrated it in place of Firefox. Also, by default Doudoulinux has a system of content protection and filtering based on DansGuardian,which will filter all the content that are not suitable for children.
Songrwite : Songwrite is a simple, yet powerful song editor and player. It is intended for people who do not know music theory. This is why it does not use the standard music notation but fingerings and tabs instead, which are simply representing the place where you put your fingers on the musical instrument! The rhythm is then represented by the space between notes. Of course you can switch to the official music notation but this is not the default application behavior.
Stopmotion : Stopmotion is an animation movie creator. It can create a movie file from a series of photos captured with a webcam for example. The typical use is to make a scene with small characters then take photos after slightly moving these characters step by step. Using the audio recording application of DoudouLinux, you should even be able to add voices, sounds or music to movies. Children will finally discover how cinema is functioning. This is also a great opportunity for them to start thinking about scenarios, characters, scenes, landscapes, etc.
Opendict : As you can guess, this is a multi-language translation dictionary. It is installed along with some dictionaries but can also be configured to fetch dictionaries from the Internet. Moreover, English words can be pronounced thanks to an extra speech synthesis system.
Empathy : Empathy is instant messaging software. It can obviously discuss with Google Talk, MSN or even Facebook, but it is configured in DoudouLinux just to be able to talk with machines from the local network. Just plug the network on your DoudouLinux computers and this should work! This way children can be initiated to this type of Internet communication without the need to create them an account and without the risk for them to get in touch with anybody on the Internet…
And naturally an huge list of software to play and learn:
- Gamine, from 2 years old or even less!
- Pysycache, from 3 years old
- Tux Paint, from 3 years old
- Childsplay, from 4 years old
- Gcompris, from 2 years old but we rather recommend from 4 years old given the DoudouLinux configuration
- Klettres, from 4 years old
- Ktuberling, from 3 years old
- Khangman, rather around 7 years old
- Kanagram, rather around 8 years old
- Kgeography, rather around 7 years old
You could be also interested to this interview to Jean-Micheal on the whole project.
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