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See also: ["Freeduc"] === Guiding Principles ===

We aim to help children and those who care for them to get the most use and enjoyment out of their Debian systems; to help them acquire some of the skills and experiences we have as adults; and to convey to them our values: our love of freedom, our appreciation for software that works well, and our strong sense of community.

That is to say, we do not aim to diminish or limit Debian to "domesticate" it for little people, but to give them the best of what Debian has to offer so they will grow to the point where they no longer need our help.

Behind every child user of Debian, we assume there is at least one older person who uses Debian and helps them with it: a guide, a mentor, a parent, a relative, a friend. So these people are our users too. It would be too easy to treat them as our primary audience. After all, they are the ones reading this web page. They are the ones installing and maintaining the system. However, they also have other places to get support in the broader community of Debian and free software. In thinking about where our energies should be focused, then, it is children first and their guides second.
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For more help with configuration, see [DebianLive/Configuration] or join #debian-live on irc.debian.org. For more help with configuration, see ["DebianLive/Configuration"] or join #debian-live on irc.debian.org.
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=== Other related projects ===

["Freeduc"]

Debian Jr.

Email: ?MailTo(debian-jr AT SPAMFREE lists DOT debian DOT org)

Debian Jr. is a project to make Debian an OS that children will enjoy using. More about the project at http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-jr and http://debianjr.alioth.debian.org/

Guiding Principles

We aim to help children and those who care for them to get the most use and enjoyment out of their Debian systems; to help them acquire some of the skills and experiences we have as adults; and to convey to them our values: our love of freedom, our appreciation for software that works well, and our strong sense of community.

That is to say, we do not aim to diminish or limit Debian to "domesticate" it for little people, but to give them the best of what Debian has to offer so they will grow to the point where they no longer need our help.

Behind every child user of Debian, we assume there is at least one older person who uses Debian and helps them with it: a guide, a mentor, a parent, a relative, a friend. So these people are our users too. It would be too easy to treat them as our primary audience. After all, they are the ones reading this web page. They are the ones installing and maintaining the system. However, they also have other places to get support in the broader community of Debian and free software. In thinking about where our energies should be focused, then, it is children first and their guides second.

Live CD development

A Debian Jr. livecd can be built using live-helper with the following steps:

svn co svn://svn.debian.org/debian-live/dists/trunk/live-helper
( cd live-helper ; debuild -us -uc )
sudo dpkg -i live-helper*.deb
svn co svn://svn.debian.org/debian-live/configs/junior
sudo make-live --root junior &>make-live.log

Currently the junior config in svn is for a usb key using gnome. You can change this by editing the appropriate variables in junior/config. Other possible values for LIVE_PACKAGES_LIST are "kde-junior" or "xfce-junior", and LIVE_BINARY_IMAGE can be changed to "iso" to generate a CD image.

For more help with configuration, see ["DebianLive/Configuration"] or join #debian-live on irc.debian.org.

Ideas collected from users

  • Create a simple ["Desktop environment"] for [http://lists.debian.org/debian-jr/2006/11/msg00014.html very young children].

    • probably the simplest way to do this is to have your X system launch straight into a [http://gcompris.net gcompris session].

      • use .xinitrc with a single command: gcompris in it, or
      • configure your ["Desktop environment"] with a ?DebianJrSpecialSession for that small user

      • gcompris has a number of command line options and configurations to make it use the full screen quite well for this scenario (! provide examples!).

["Freeduc"]


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