I set my 12 year-old daughter up with Fedora 9 and KDE 4. Her initial experiences are proving to be thought-provoking. What little computer experience she has is mostly with Windows, but she has run iTunes on OSX.

Her mom’s (my ex-wife) first question was, “Can’t it run Windows? That’s what she needs for school”. I explained that the system didn’t come with Windows, and that Fedora was free, and easy to keep up to date. Also, any documents could be saved in formats readable by Microsoft applications. It’s really a shame they don’t run Linux/OO at school.

Still, I have to admit some misgivings about this experiment. Is Linux ready for teenagers? I like to thing that subjecting my daughter to an environment where she has to figure things out will be good for her, as opposed to letting her run Windows, where she can go ask adults for help (often getting bad advice) at every turn.

We’ll see how this goes

Macintosh SE
Bought: 1987
Cost: $2,300 (with Student Discount, normally $2,900).
RAM: 1MB
CPU: 8MHz Motorola 68000
Storage: two 800 kB floppy drives

I bought my first computer just before going to grad. school in 1987. It was a dual-floppy Mac SE. I started programming by writing a Pascal program that was an N-body gravitational simulation of the solar system.

Macintosh Quadra 630
Bought: 1994
Cost: $1200 (?)
CPU: 33MHz Motorola 68040
RAM: 4 MB

My last Mac – the OS was getting ugly, and I couldn’t depend
on buying stuff that would work (MIDI interfaces, CDROMs, software).

Dell XPSR
Bought: 1998
Cost: $2,300
CPU: Intel Pentium 400MHz
Storage: SCSI 40 MB (?)

My first PC, purchased when I joined a start-up. It ran as my web-server up until 2003, first running Windows/IIS, then Windows/Apache, then Linux (RedHat 9).

Dell Dimension 8200
Bought: 2001
Cost: $2300
CPU: Intel 1.3 GHz
RAM 512 MB

This is the first PC I tried to do media on. I got an Audigy external box for the thing, plus a DVD burner. I switched this to Linux around 2005 (FC3?). I used it up until a couple of days ago.

Dell Inspiron 518
Bought: 2008
Cost: $330
CPU: Intel dual-core 2 GHz
RAM: 1GB
Storage: 250GB

My latest – significantly cheaper and quite a bit better. Fedora 9 is running nicely on it.