My 5 year old grandson lives with me.
He is a beautiful, loving and intelligent child with autism.
His mother passed away before he was 2 from rapidly invasive
breast cancer. She was only 29.
The family inherited her old Dell desktop that was painfully slow
and malware ridden. I did the best I could to clean it up but many
things I could not repair. Mercifully, the hard disk crashed.
Now I had been dabbling around with linux for a bit and found an old
hard drive in a discarded machine. I pulled it out the drive,
stuck it in the dell and it booted!
I started seriously distro hopping for something lightweight to run
on this machine with only 256m of ram.
Buying more ram was not an option at the time since RAMBUS memory
is/was much more expensive than any other type of ram.
Plus I was unemployed for an extended time and the choice was
ram vs. food on the table.
I finally settled for Jaunty and loaded LXDE on top of it.
The machine ran pretty good with just occasional swapping.
(I've since added 512 of ram)
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Now my grandsons' autism manifests itself mainly as a speech problem.
He only can say a few word clearly and he knows it.
So he prefers not to attempt speech much of the time.
Communications is often non-verbal.
He also has obsessive-compulsive disorder.
My grandson was first introduced to computers when he was just days old.
His grandpa (me) would hold him and show him music videos and whatever
perked his interest on Youtube.
Before he was 4 I turned him loose on his own account. (The hardest thing
was teaching him how to put in his password when he could not see the text.)
He has just turned 5 and can operated any computer in the house effortlessly.
He's not afraid to poke around as has taught himself quite a bit.
(I would never turn him loose on a windows machine!)
Most of the time he has a browser open to PBS or a game site, plus
abiword and tuxpaint running. (Yes, he does multitasking quite well.)
He has not only learned to operate a computer but is learning words
and is pretty good at gaming just from the keyboard. He also has tons
of bookmarks to old-school Sesame Street videos.
He knows the alphabet and can count to 20 forward and backwards.
He also knows the alphabet in sign language.
The only problem with linux is the lack of software for speech
therapy and children with disabilities. There are many for windows,
at a price, but not so here. These children need all the help they
can get and hopefully someone will port or create some applications.
But if someone tells you that linux is to complicated, send them over.
My grandson will show them the ropes!
Thanks for reading.
