Matthew's Computer

Last Sunday, the wife and I went out to buy a computer table. I've been planning to revive an old Dell I had laying around and repurposing it to be an all-around computer for the kids. My son has simple needs. He has great fun playing the games included in Child's Play and Gcompris. Well the wife and I ended up buying a cheap computer table from Saver's Mall in Balibago.

After I got home, I immediately started working on the machine. I had a little trouble getting it to work but I eventually managed to get it booting again. After I got it working I tried a live linux distribution. These have an advantage over installed versions, since an operating system running from a CD can't be modified like one that is installed. I tried Fedora 12 Games, but it was just too slow. I tried another linux distribution, called Linux Mint 8. It booted a lot more faster than Fedora, but it still took 8-10 minutes. I could just imagine my son jumping in anticipation only to get tired before the machine had fully booted. He's a little hyper over waiting time and jumps excitedly at times. I tried another one called  DreamLinux. I had been able to run 3.1 before on this same machine and it worked okay. DreamLinux didn't have any games on the Live version so I had to install it. I used the latest version,  DreamLinux 3.5. The computer was having problems booting into it so I gave it a rest.

The next few days I spent trying all sorts of tinkering on the computer to make it work. I decided to try an old Edubuntu CD from 2006 that I had lying around. for those of you who are unfamiliar with it, Edubuntu is a version of Ubuntu that is packaged with educational software with games and applications for both educators and students. Good thing is it's packaged with games even for pre-schoolers. I have to download them though because these were optional applications.

I finally had it booting but I was disappointed becaused it had too few games that would suit Matthew. The problem is the servers for this older version are already outdated so I wouldn't be able to download more games even if I wanted to. I'm now downloading the latest DVD version of Edubuntu, plan to install it, test it and download more games if there aren't that many on there by default. Wish me luck :-)