Making an Computer Playspace for the Kids

Qimo is a kids/educational version of Ubuntu*. A coworker brought Qimo to my attention through this link. It runs smoothly on limited hardware. Being Linux-based, Qimo is free. There is also an educational version of Ubuntu called Edubuntu, but it's not nearly as fun or cute as Qimo.

Here's where I get fancy. The usual problem with running VM's from your home PC is that you don't have enough memory. The usual effective upper limit is 3.5GB, XP with SP3 wants 1GB and Vista is even more of a pig. Qimo on the other hand will get by on 256MB of RAM and a 400MHz processor. You can easily run this on top of your working windows system with little or no impact. Both VMware Player and Server will allow you to create a desktop icon to launch the VM and open a console window like it's just another application.

Both VMware Player and Server are free with registration. Server has more options but is more complicated to configure. Player is pretty dead simple, but you'll have to have someone create the initial VM for you, or use EasyVMX to spec out your system**. Since Qimo is actually faster, more secure and kid friendly as a live-cd, we can just run it from the iso image. This means that when we configure the VM, we can just give it 384MB of RAM and tell it to skip the VM hard-drive and NIC. When it asks you about the CD, change it from the local device to load the Qimo iso (which I saved into the Qimo Virtual Machine directory.)

This means that, aside from time to download the Qimo iso and your choice of VMware program, in about a half and hour***, you can have a safe PC for your child to play on -- no worrying about Internet access and no futzing around getting an old PC working and loading the OS, not to mention setting up a space for the new-old PC. If they spend a lot of time with Qimo and really like it, you can always go back and add a drive and do a full install, updates, etc. If they play it once to humor you and then ignore it, the process didn't cost much but time, and not much of that.

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* - Ubuntu is my current choice for a friendly Linux environment. If you're thinking about giving Linux a try, I think this is the way to go.

** - Since EasyVMX assumes you will have at least one harddrive, are using the host system's cd/dvd drive and a nic, you'll need to edit the .vmx file created. It's just a text ini file. Just change scsi0:0.present = "TRUE" to "FALSE" and the hd is gone, change ide1:0.fileName = "D:" to the path to the Qimo iso file, and change ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-raw" to "cdrom-image" to boot to the iso. As you should suspect by now, changing Ethernet0.present = "TRUE" to "FALSE" will remove the nic.

*** - If you've never used any VMware product before, be prepared to spend some time getting this part working. There's a lot of complex questions, but you're pretty safe in just taking the defaults -- as galling as that may be.