Wingspan
It’s openSUSE, for kids! Wingspan GNU/Linux is designed for children ages 2-12, and has many fun games and educational programs for your young ones. The goal of this project is to design a friendly desktop experience where children can have fun and learn without their caretakers having to worry about potential problems that can come with kids using a real partition or having access to the Internet. Wingspan can fit onto a CD or a small flash drive, and is based on openSUSE 12.3 with GNOME 3. Wingspan comes with an attractive splash screen and wallpaper, as well as a simple interface. This project is still in active development, and feedback would be hugely appreciated!
Wingspan has over 60 fun games, puzzles, and educational helpers! Some programs that come with Wingspan include:
-Abe (a sidescrolling adventure with a retro feel)
-Blobby Volley (light-hearted volleyball game)
-Childsplay (a suite of games and educational tools for younger children)
-Cubetest (a program for teaching and testing spatial reasoning skills)
-Cute Maze (a simple maze game appropriate for all ages, even those who are quite young)
-Frozen Bubble (Puzzle Bobble style arcade game)
-GCompris (educational suite for ages 2-10)
-GBrainy (brain teaser and puzzle games)
-GNOME Games (classic and familiar board and arcade games)
-Gweled (a gem-matching game)
-KGeography (a trainer program for learning world geography)
-Klavaro (a touch typing tutor)
-Multiplication Station (trainer for learning 12×12 multiplication tables)
-Pingus (a Lemmings clone with penguins)
-Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection (a collection of small brainteasers and puzzles for all skill levels)
-Solar Wolf (unique, fun arcade game)
-SuperTux (a sidescroller similar to Super Mario Bros.)
-Tux Paint (fun painting program for all ages)
-Variations on Rockdodger (a space-themed game that requires quick reflexes)
…And many other fun arcade, educational, and puzzle games!
Wingspan is an offline distribution, so you can have peace of mind knowing that your children will only see age-appropriate content.
If you’re interested in some screenshots, visit here: https://joindiaspora.com/posts/2554812
- Known issue: Some games will not display or control properly in VMware Player. Penguin Command, Solar Wolf, and Frozen Bubble have trouble relating to Python. I have tried the games on four different physical computers, and have not encountered this issue. I can only conclude at this time that this is a software support issue regarding VMware.
Download
Media
USB & disk image
This is an image of your disk, ready to be written to either a USB drive or your hard disk. When written, it will erase all data on a disk. During the first boot, your partition will be automatically resized to fill available space.
ISO image
Burn this ISO file to a DVD (or CD, if the space allows), and you'll be able to boot directly from the disc.
Preload ISO
A bootable ISO containing the appliance disk image. Boots into a simple graphical environment and prompts for confirmation before writing the image onto the hard drive. Useful for performing automated system installs/preloads.
Warning: Overwrites all data on the target hard drive.
Virtual
VMware / VirtualBox / KVM image
Whether you use VMware, VirtualBox, or KVM, this vmdk is a ready-to-use virtual appliance.
Release notes
3.3.0
- BIG changes on the gaming front with this release. GNOME’s collection of games has been modified to pick out a few redundant programs, and Simon Tatham’s puzzle collection has been added. With this change, there are now over 60 separate programs on an .iso that will fit onto a standard CD.
-Removed gnome-games, added most games from the collection back as individual packages.
-Removed glines, gnome-sudoku, gnomine, gnotski, swell-foop, gplanarity, lightsoff. (all either redundant or broken)
-Removed Armagetron. (still having issues with it playing on some devices using Live USB/CD.
-Added “puzzles” with an external .rpm (Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection is a collection of over 30 brainteasers and puzzles for all ages and skill levels)
-Added Kcheckers. (a checkers game for younger players who may not understand chess yet)
-Added Penguin Command (a more modern version of the classic Missile Command)
-Upgraded all 4.10.0 KDE apps to 4.10.2
3.2.2
-Added Katomic, a puzzle game of forming molecules.
-Updated Gbrainy.
-Updated Gcompris.
3.2.1
- We have liftoff!
-Added Cube Escape, a 3D maze puzzler.
-Added Cubetest, a game for teaching and testing spatial reasoning skills.
-Added Gplanarity, another fun puzzle game.
-Added Gweled, a gem-matching game.
-Manually added .desktop files for Cubetest and Cube Escape, since by default neither of those programs would show up in the GNOME 3 menus.
3.1.0
-Removed TIPP10. The language of TIPP10 defaults to German. Can be changed via menus, but that’s given the user knows German well enough to navigate through the options.
-Removed Blinken: Blinken was broken.
-Added Klavaro, a touch typing tutor to replace TIPP10.
-Added ‘space’ stamps to Tux Paint.
3.0.1
-Upgraded to an openSUSE 12.3 base.
-Pulled support & availability of legacy Wingspan 1.1.x versions.
-Removed glibc-locale and used POSIX as language instead. Saves space in a distribution which will not go online or have much use for language not supplied in-software.
-Reduced .iso size back to under 700MB after some complaints from users wishing to put the .iso on a CD.
-Added Abe.
-Added Armagetron.
-Added Childsplay.
-Added Gcalctool.
-Removed many heavyweight games and trimmed the game selection down in a way to reduce game redundancy. (ie: Wingspan no longer has both KSnake and Nibbles, both snake games)
- Wingspan now has a custom default wallpaper!
Changelog
11 dependencies removed
30 dependencies updated
3 new dependencies
12 new software selections
5 software selections removed
Build configuration updated
Technical Details
Appliance configuration
Accounts
| User | Password |
|---|---|
| root | root |
| wingspan | wingspan |
Basic settings
| Keyboard: | english-us |
|---|---|
| Time zone: | UTC |
| Language: | POSIX |
| Network: | dhcp |
| Firewall: | disabled |
Software
3 patterns, 811 packagesView package list…
Security summary
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-
The following software packages were uploaded:
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Overlay files were uploaded, but none are executable.
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A boot script is included.
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Version 3.3.0
Testdrive
Older releases
- Version 3.2.2 – 27 days old
- Version 3.2.1 – 30 days old
- Version 3.1.0 – 31 days old
- Version 3.0.1 – 32 days old
View all appliances published by Sam Thornton
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Everyone's comments
Sorry Ted Bland, I ment to post that as a reply to my own comment, not yours
Can I make a version for Really little kids? (1-6 or so)
Sounds like an interesting project.
Thank you for your interest, Ted!
I made some modifications beyond removing software inappropriate for two to six year olds, such as added firefox and flash player, and already have a not to parents to install the Kidzui adon before letting the kids use it, I have reset language for ask at first boot, and added the firewall. I intend to just install the Kidzui browser and dump FF, but I don’t know how long that will take. if you have any problems with this, tell me.
Hey, nice to hear that I’ve provided some inspiration, or at least a base to build on! It’s an open project, so of course you can make any modifications you want. If you can credit me for the bootsplash image of the swallow, if you choose to keep it, I would appreciate that. Good luck with your project, and happy building. :)
excellent!!!
Thanks for the compliment!
Great!
Thanks for trying it out! :)