I'm wanting to get my son into computers....

[T Zack Crawford]

LFS is pretty hard to set up. I think the biggest issue kids have getting into computers is finding something that they will have the attention span to deal with. Find them a project to work on that they will enjoy. You can always set them up with a linux desk/laptop for daily use, although that does not in itself develop their knowledge, only peace the door open for customization.

I would recommend perhaps having them code their own video game. Unity is a good free-as-in-beer game engine for casual game development with lots of free information available online. There are not many good free GPL game engines, unfortunately. Maybe try making some music in Ardour.

Perhaps you can have him expand upon the ways he already uses a computer. Maybe it would be fun to customize a desktop look and feel? Distro hop or check out alternate desktop environments. Customize your own tiling window manager setup.  Use the command line when you can. Use a terminal instead of a GUI file manager. Dmenu is a cool program for scripting UI elements on a desktop with plain text piping.

Write scripts to automate tedious common tasks. Make a new application that does something you want. Fork an existing application adding new features. Rewrite an existing application in a different language. Find an API and automate a task that uses it. Publish your original work to github.

Try making your own website. Use LaTeX for document typesetting. Try doing some data analytics or machine learning in python. Make a simple artificial intelligence to help solve a problem.


There's all kinds of ways to learn about using computers and coding. Pick a project and try seeing what you can do. If you don't know how to do something, find a stack exchange article or dive into some documentation. You'll pick up new knowledge as you go.

Oct 18, 2022 11:06:19 Michael via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org>:

> He's 11 now. How do you recommend I proceed? I was thinking of trying to get him to build an OS. I was thinking Linux From Scratch. but am unsure how to proceed. Any advice?
> 
> -- 
> :-)~MIKE~(-:
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