Best Linux distro for special needs sister who is at learning stage of toddler?

Linux Support
1

I have an acer aspire one netbook with ubuntu 11.04 on, but it lags alot with 11.04, and have recently decided to let my sister have it.
She is basically at the learning stage of a toddler, although she is 14.
So I would like a very easy to use distro that meets up to these needs:

  1. to be dedicated for special needs/toddlers/education,

  2. to be very low on system requirements, like puppy Linux,
    that also does not use up too much of the netbooks graphics, so that I can spare that for educational games,

  3. to be able to have largish buttons on the desktop for specific apps that normally use, (similar to apple iOS or the up coming Windows 8 tiles)

  4. apps that fill up the entire screen.

  5. I would like a window manager like kde4 but that is more netbook friendly and that includes more images than words, that can be customized.

  6. the mouse pointers and icons need to be pretty big, so that she can see what she is doing and where stuff is.

  7. I do not want gnome, but the fedora gnome 3 menu would be great.

I sure hope that I can get a distro that meets up to these requirements, if not more, as my sister does not want any devices other than my netbook at the moment.

And I sure hope that this works wonders for my sister rather than getting a windows 8 tablet, as I do not want to introduce windows to her.

I hope this makes sense to you.

Thanks

Jason

2

I was going to suggest Qimo4Kids, but their website seems to have disappeared… so at first I thought it had dissapeared.

But I’ve discovered it can be installed as a desktop environment in Ubuntu… see here:
http://www.spotht.com/2010/11/install-qimo-desktop-environment-for.html

There is even a link to a LiveCD ISO, though I have no idea which version of Ubuntu that is based on… so you may want to try the desktop environment on 11.04 first… it’s available in Synaptic… then just choose Qimo as the session at the login screen (or set it as the default session).

It’s based on the XFCE desktop environment, so should be lighter than running the full GNOME desktop.

There’s plenty of info on Qimo on Google :slight_smile: