Wiki

• FrontPage
• RecentChanges
• FindPage
• HelpContents
• DebianJr

Debian Jr. (Debian Junior) is a Debian Pure Blend to make Debian an OS that children will enjoy using. This is the documentation wiki for the project.

Junior Tasks summarizes what is included in Debian Jr.

What is Debian Jr.?

Debian Jr. is an internal project to make Debian an OS that children of all ages will want to use. Our initial focus will be on producing something for children up to age 8. Once we have accomplished this, our next target age range is 7 to 12. By the time children reach their teens, they should be comfortable with using Debian without any special modifications.

Debian Jr. provides a collection of packages for children and their guides. Beyond merely providing entertainment, the packages we have selected cover a broad range of areas, from those which help the child visualize what is inside their operating system to music, art, writing and programming as well as some games and desktop toys. We hope that child and guides alike will have fun, learn together, and make creative use of this excellent free software.

Ultimately, we owe the free software authors and maintainers the thanks for what they have given the world. Our work is to gather their work together into the Debian distribution, making it readily available to children and their guides. Once we select a package, we care for its quality, listening to the users, sending wishlists, bug reports, and fixes to Debian and upstream maintainers. It is this constant dialog between users and developers that ensures that the free software and our users continue to be our priorities, as we have promised in our Social Contract.

Finally, the Social Contract is key to understanding why we have embarked on this project at all. We hope that you will catch the spirit of this project, become excited by it, and by using Debian Jr. will not only benefit from what it has to offer as a system, but will also realize the benefits of entering into the global free software community which we serve.

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, we place children first and their guides second.

Metapackage development

The git repository on salsa contains the latest development of our metapackages to date.

Debian Jr. Bugs summarizes bugs in the dependencies of these metapackages. src:debian-junior bugs.

Check out the metapackage source with:

git clone https://salsa.debian.org/blends-team/junior.git

or for developer access:

git clone git@salsa.debian.org:blends-team/junior.git

Project status

The project is inactive since few years. 2021-12 Stefan will try to relaunch this project.

• Project Stage Plan

• Project Log

• This wiki pages for project documentation

• Communication via Public Mailing List

I would like to add Debian Junior into Debian 13 (trixie). See wishlist bug 1036906.

Debian Junior Desktop

What is Debian Junior Desktop?

Debian Junior Desktop is a metapackage to provide a Desktop Environment for Debian Junior. This package provides set of applications and utilities for our blend project.

What is included in Debian Junior Desktop?

lightdm is the chosen Display Manager and Icewm is the window manager for Debian Junior. The window manager is fast and memory-efficient, it should work on "old" / "small" hardware. The desktop can be configured very easily and it's user-robust

thunar is used as file manager and epiphany-browser as the web browser.

The groupware suite evolution is pre-installed as mail client and organizer and dino-im as chat application to text / talk / call with friends and family.

Utilities like gnome-calculator, gnome-clocks, gnome-dictionary are installed along with libreoffice as office productivity suite.

And,... some games.

Debian Junior Desktop Live Image

The build of Debian Junior Desktop Live Image has been activated for the weekly "(testing)" build. See details on the Mailing list: Debian Junior Desktop live image ("Developer Edition") <20241111180842.da6wza2lqccvl2p4@posteo.de>

Debian Junior use IceWM Window Manager

Nice games are installed

Support Debian Junior Development / Testing

You can support development and testing on a fresh system / virtual machine and provide feedback.

How to install the development version of Debian Junior:

• Install an minimal Debian system (via netinstal)

• Switch from Debian stable (bookworm) to testing (trixie)

  • sed -i 's/bookworm/trixie/g' /etc/apt/sources.list Switch to trixie

  • apt update && apt full-upgrade Upgrade the system to trixie

  • reboot

• Install Debian Junior Desktop

  • apt install junior-desktop

  • reboot

Debian Junior Desktop needs ~ 7GB disk space.

Note: The Debian Junior System menu is not available, yet.

Subpages