User:Sostenibilista/MySandboxes

DoudouLinux is a child oriented GNU/Linux distribution, born in 2010, which first stable release had been in [2011]]. Based on Debian, whose is a recognized derivative, and available in several languages, it aims to do of ease of use and adaptability to different steps of child's growth its strong points, so that it can fit for preschool childs, from two years of age.

DoudouLinux include near 50 applications that have been selected to be easily accessibles to childs or dedicated to childs. This choice include educational games, artistic expression oriented applications (drawing, music, animation movies), work oriented applications (dictionary, calculator, communication) and fun games.

The DoudouLinux development is managed from a community of volunteer from several nationalities grown around the project founder, Jean-Michel Philippe, that release it like free software with license GNU GPL. Because the community also have the target to make computers acerssible to all childs in the world, without discriminations, DoudouLinux is also shipped for free.

The name
“Doudou” is a French word that means wubby, the teddy bear or the cloth that children carry everywhere and hug very strongly in their arms before falling asleep. In China, the word 豆豆 (or 逗逗, dòu dòu or do do ) means the same and is pronounced the same too. Developers found this coincidence interesting.

Adaptability
After having started, DoudouLinux only shows the menu of the proposed activities according to the default or to custom settings; the main DoudouLinux menu give access to the various activities available, in increasing order of difficulty.

The first five activities launch a single application whose name is indicated:
 * Gamine (to learn the basic use of mouse, from 2 years old)
 * Pysycache (to learn advanced mouse use, from 3 years old)
 * TuxPaint (drawing program for children from 3 to 12 years old)
 * Childsplay (a collection of activities for children aged from 4 and more: mouse, keyboard, memory games with images and sounds, letters and numbers learning games as well as entertaining activities)
 * GCompris (a collection of activities for children aged from 2 to 10: computer discovery, games of mathematics, science, geography, reading, etc.)

These softwares guide children into discovering computers and lead them, little by little, to start feel confident in mouse and keyboard while having fun. The activities menu is back as soon as the application is quited.

Both last activities, “Mini DoudouLinux” and “Whole DoudouLinux” are sets of more advanced activities (for older children). Their interface is looking like interfaces that are usually found on computers. Except that application launch icons are located and arranged into tabs.

These activities give access to a larger number of applications, targeting older children. Some of them let you change few settings of the system.

DoudouLinux can be adapted to children age if you use all the tools that are provided for this purpose:
 * existence of various activities requiring various computer skills
 * thanks to the first 5 proposed activities, difficulty level is increasing until “Mini DoudouLinux” and “Whole DoudouLinux” are reached
 * Among the applications located in “Whole DoudouLinux”, one of them can be used to hide the softwares shown in the very first menu of activities. Thus, for example, if the child is two years old, only Gamine can be shown, then after several months Pysycache can be added, at 3 years old, Childsplay and TuxPaint, at 4 years old, GCompris and so on and so worth until “Mini DoudouLinux” and “Whole DoudouLinux” are added.

Thanks to the activities selection tool in “Whole DoudouLinux”, two additional activities can be added. They were designed thanks to the fundamental contribution of the Tomsk Pedagogical State Uiversity (Russia) especially for use in schools:
 * “Kids DoudouLinux” : designed for young children, in preschool
 * “Junior DoudouLinux” : designed for older children, from the first levels of primary schools

Releases
From the first release of may 2010 the development team stated for a 3 month development cycle. At the end of the development period we release a working, but not oficially stable, version, intermediate step towards the next oficially stable release. The very first release of DoudouLinux was the 2010-05, in june 2010: it was a development version, based on Debian Lenny, supporting only 4 languages: Arabic, French, English and Spanish. Instead, in september 2011 it was released the first development version based on Debian Squeeze. Below stable versions are reported.

DoudouLinux 1.0 "Gondwana"
La 1.0 è la prima versione stabile di DoudouLinux, rilasciata il 15 giugno 2011 dopo quasi un anno dall'inizio del progetto e la formazione della comunità. Per evidenziare l'evento a questa versione è stato dato un nome: Gondwana, come il supercontinente che includeva la maggior parte delle terre emerse nell'attuale emisfero Sud, prima che si suddividesse in diversi continenti a causa della tettonica a zolle.

DoudouLinux 1.0 è stato rilasciato in 15 lingue ufficialmente supportate (Arabo, Cinese, Olandese, Inglese, Francese, Greco, Italiano, Persiano, Polacco, Spagnolo, Rumeno, Russo, Serbo, Svedese e Ucraino), basate su 5 differenti alfabeti (arabo, cinese, cirillico, greco e latino), e 6 lingue dimostrative (Tedesco, Ebreo, Indonesiano, Portoghese, Turco e Vietnamita).

DoudouLinux Gondwana ha introdotto due nuovi programmi, più un nuovo lanciatore e un programma sostitutivo per il gestore delle reti:

Songwrite2 è un lettore e compositore di canzoni semplice ma potente StopMotion è un creatore di film di animazione semplice ma potente Jukebox è un piccolo lanciatore che riproduce i documenti musicali contenuti nella cartella Musica dell'utente Network Manager rimpiazza il precedente strumento di gestione delle reti lxnm che non era in grado di trattare facilmente le reti Wifi

Le prime 3 nuove applicazioni sono disponibili nell'attività Tutto DoudouLinux, nella scheda multimedia. Questo rilascio ha mostrato lo spostamento dell'attenzione del progetto verso i contenuti digitali, in conformità alla convinzione della comunità che i bambini necessitino anche di essere istruiti all'uso e creazione di contenuti digitali, per i quali i calcolatori rimangono il miglior strumento.

Per questa versione sono stati rilasciati i seguenti aggiornamenti:

DoudouLinux 1.1
The 30 sptember 2011 was released the first release of DoudouLinux Gondwana, mainly a language update. Translations was improved of some of the supported languages and 10 new languages was added: Czech, Danish, Lettone, Latvian, Malay, Norwegian, Portuguese, Portuguese do Brazil, German, Telugu. DoudouLinux 1.1 officially support 25 languages, and more 4 demo languages (Hebrew, Indonesian, Turkish and Vietnamese). Some bugs was also fixed and an instrument was created to easily set the user name to chat on local networks.[18].