The Shell Game

I was looking through the search terms that brought folks to my ESL teaching blog. One really caught my eye. The person had searched for “linux esl game”. I thought that was really interesting. He/She didn’t find what he/she was looking for here. But it did inspire me to write this entry. And maybe the next person searching for something similar will give Edubuntu a whirl.

I had seen Edubuntu a while back. It’s a spin-off of Ubuntu. It’s aimed at teachers and students, but it would also work well in a home environment. It comes pre-packaged with educational games, the entire Open Office suite and a variety of other things. Because it’s built off of Ubuntu, it’s part of a well established community. I’ve found the Ubuntu forums to be very friendly to those just getting started and a treasure trove of information. The distro also has the advantage of frequent updates. Ubuntu and it’s derivatives work on a 6 month release cycle. The current version is 7.10, code named “Gutsy Gibbon”. Don’t you just love the code names???

The other advantage many Linux distros, including the *buntu family, have is the ability to run it off a “Live CD“. You basically just pop the CD in and reboot your computer. As long as you can boot from a CD, it will load up. It will run slower than if you actually installed it to your hard drive, but it does give you a feeling for what running a Linux distro is like.

I cut my Linux teeth on Ubuntu. I highly recommend it to anyone who’s interested in learning more about Linux. It has excellent hardware support. I started on 7.04 (Feisty Fawn). Aside from it not supporting my weird wide screen monitor’s resolution and a WPA encrypted wireless out of the box, it ‘Just Worked’. Although I’ve upgraded my install to 7.10, I haven’t played around with it much, so I’m not even sure if those minor issues have been resolved. I’m quite happy with Fedora 7 and I only keep Ubuntu around for fun or when I want to see the differences between a Debian based distro (which Ubuntu is) and a Red Hat based distro (which Fedora is). In all honesty, it might be perfectly realistic not to ever touch the command line (aka “the shell”) using a member of the *buntu family. I won’t lie, the shell can be more than a little intimidating. But for some things, it’s much quicker than pointing and clicking through a zillion menus. And let’s face it, kids are flexible. Using the shell is very much like speaking another language. Kids are wired to learn. They absorb new stuff like little sponges. That’s not to say an adult can’t do it. I’m certainly making headway.

I’ll leave you with a few screen shots of Edubuntu. Click the pictures for a full size version.

The Desktop

Nautilus File Browser

Kalzium

GCompris Math