I acquired an Eee PC for my Phoebs. On special somewhere, unfortunately not a pink one ;-)
While I see that lots of people are replacing the Asus/Xandros OS with Ubuntu for Eee or other distros, I’ve decided to stick with the default for now. It’s a very easy desktop to use, with all clutter, confusion and traps disabled but still accessible through other means. Traps you ask? Yea… traps. A three-year-old with a mouse is a dangerous mix ;-)

So, why have a computer for a 3 year old anyway, and why an Eee, and ….?
Phoebe is already quite aware that work generally involves using a computer, so she insists having one on her little play desk: “for work”; that’s no reason to give her one though. Eee starts very quickly, being flash based and in its default simple desktop mode. Smurf gets easily bored so any regular machine just doesn’t cut it (believe me I’ve tried).

But kids these days must to become computer literate. Being able to use a mouse and a keyboard is not an optional extra. So, letting them play with it from early on, it’s a natural thing rather than something complicated later.

I installed GCompris and put it into the Learn menu, as Phoebe loves to play with the mouse exercises.
She also liked typing, but I haven’t yet found a program that allows just simple “keyboard bashing” without icon clutter (more traps). Suggestions welcome – perhaps an add-on for GCompris?

And no, I won’t be installing MySQL on this machine!