Yesterday, as if you didn’t know was the release date of Hardy Heron Ubuntu 8.04, and once the servers cooled down and the torrents where seeded it was pretty easy to get a copy. My son who is 10 was jumping at the bit to upgrade his computer, a trusty old Inspiron 5100. So I decided to let him install without any help from good ol’ dad.

As I was lying in bed, waiting for Morpheus to take me in his embrace, I once again started getting a mindful of ideas (Must have been that pesky Belphegor again, the demon of invention and lost sleep). This time I thought about children and creativity and a way to channel it to more productive purposes.

Kellen Hage typically uses a three-year-old Averatec Inc. laptop to browse the Web and send instant messages. But the laptop's Microsoft Corp. Windows software has too many hard-to-find features, making it cumbersome for Kellen.
After all, he's just 6 years old.
So his mother, Ellen Hage, was thrilled recently when she found a laptop specifically targeted at kids Kellen's age.

For any parent, myself included, setting your kids loose on the net is a daunting prospect. We have to do it because the net is a fact of life - it's in our schools, the workplace, public libraries and in many if not most homes of the developed world. Therefore, do we really have any option but to give them Linux?

While we can endlessly debate One Laptop Per Child on OLPC News, what really matters will be the opinions and adoption of XO technology by children. And recently children have been expressing their views on the matter.

"This news got me thinking about the potential child abuse risks inherent in the One Laptop Per Child initiative and other "$100 laptop" projects. These well-intentioned efforts plan to give computers to poor children throughout the world, to facilitate their education and fuel economic development."