Teachers are always on the lookout for educational software that can actually hold a child’s attention. Instead of cutting the kids loose on the Xbox, why not give GCompris a try?

“Hannah Montana Linux” may not be ready to give to your kids yet, but it’s an idea that has legs.

There's been a lot of talk about the OLPC's cute little mesh networking laptop at Linux.conf.au this week. The foundation is taking its low-cost, robust laptop the XO to underprivileged kids around the world, but it's also funding its work by selling XO laptops to the public. The cool news from the LCA conference was that a local OLPC group is setting up in Australia to help get computers to kids across Australia.

I seriously don’t understand why schools don’t do this. If your school needs a PC lab, buy a whole bunch of Pentium 3 computers (or even Pentium 2) and run Ubuntu. It comes with almost everything a school computer needs. Kids in public school won’t know how to modify the system in any way and its completely safe to use.

All over the world millions of kids are studying computers and technology. Imagine what a difference we could make if we could figure out how to help the open source community embrace that opportunity. What if we could help kids explore how computer systems in the real world work in a friction-less playground that allows them to crack open the box, explore its insides and tinker.

Teaching young students or even your own kids to learn or be interested in programming can be really daunting. However, there are free programming languages that are designed to teach children the basic concepts and elements required in traditional programming that you can use to get the job done quite easily.

Recently, a few of us had a discussion about translating the book to Malayalam. GNU/Linux is now available in a lot of schools - and a local language version would be a boon to many smart kids who are capable of learning things by themselves. I suggested that we have a go at writing an `orignal’ book - mostly because I was having this pet idea of writing a book for kids for a long time.

Today we’re going to continue our journey through the Ubuntu software repository looking for more children’s Linux educational software. As more and more parents allow their children to use the computer, setting up your kids with a Linux distribution makes even more sense:

It's good to see news about continuing adoption of open source software in schools around the world. I've written before about how doable it would be for many American schools to reduce costs, increase efficiency and arm kids with Linux notebooks through open source adoption.