[ARMedslack] Upset regarding raspberry pi - unsuported.-Opinion

[Stuart Winter]

> > sure how a 9/10 year old would take to running Slackware. I wanted the
> > children to use Slackware because I use Slackware, but time was
> > running short. and I did not think I had it right for a 9/10 year old
> > child, so I thought 'hey why not just load the Rpi debian image?',
> > checking the website I wrongly assumed they had gone commercial. This
> > was further fueled by the conversation I had with my partner
> > concerning lock ins and proprietary software ( iPods/kindles/android
> > devices).

The thing is that, based on my own experience alone, if the child has -for
any reason- an interest in the device, they'll want to try and understand
it and get inside it. My first machine was an Atari 520STFM which is not
open source or open anything.  In fact, the reason I became interested in
computers was due to the pirated software games disks.  The disks often included many other
interesting tools such as 'packers' (on-the-fly decompressors so that the
pirates could fit >1 game on a disk), and dissassemblers and so on.  I
found the included tools more interesting than the games so spent more
time with those!  As long as there are tools to create (development
languages), and examples (open source software, or in the case of the BBC
and RISC OS, most software was written in BASIC anyway (since it's
probably the fastest BASIC in the world, without compiling) so you could
just open it in an editor and start tinkering with small things to begin
with)  to learn from, children -- anybody -- can learn if they have a desire and
tenacity.

>>My nephew is delighted with his RC helicopter, and the Boy
> > wants only his XBox, the girl, however can't wait to write stories on
> > the new computer . Now I have to teach her Vi.

My nephews want to play on their X-Box and I think it's a total waste of
life.  At least when I played on my computers, I was learning not just
useful concepts (I found myself looking at some old BBC BASIC programs the
other day as I remembered one in particular had a routine that I could
potentially use in something I was working on), but also learning
programming and (without knowing it at the time) troubleshooting.  If kids
just sit infront of games consoles, they're not really learning much
useful unless they're into lucid dreaming where they can act the stuff
out again, as far as I can tell.

Vi? heh. I wish '!Zap' could be ported to Linux.
http://zap.tartarus.org/screenshots
It was the best editor in the entire solar system.

-- 
Stuart Winter
Slackware ARM: www.armedslack.org