i've worked at an afterschool program before with little kids and probably will be soon again and i was thinking of donating a computer to them so i can practice programming to make them programs. I figured i could put linux on it as to not tainit them to M$ at a young age but not sure which distro would be goodl Here a few things i'd need it to do.
1. the hardware would probably be from thriftstores so old software, so it couldn't be bloated
2. user friendly enough so kids could click an icon to start the program
3. good programming enviroment.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Also if there was a point i over looked i'd appriecate someone pointing them out to me. I figured Tux is a good spokesmodel that kids might like. thanks

You ought to take a good look at http://distrowatch.com - I don't know whether they can sort distros by how new your hardware would have to be.

Things to look out for:

For your graphical environment, it sounds like you're looking for a desktop environment like XFCE 4 (4.2 came out only a little while ago), or e17 in a few months (e == enlightenment, they have started releasing version 17, but development is not quite complete). I mention enlightenment because it is both light-weight (CPU) and visually appealing, with animation effects that the kids will enjoy.

I don't know what your exact purpose is going to be, whether you need to be flexible moving to alternative hardware where you can't install linux on the hard drive. In which case, you will want to look at live CDs like Knoppix.

HTH,

Samsara

IMHO you need to remod just bout any distro to fit the bill since the kids will want it to look prety.Feather is a good starting point.It can use just about all mydsl extensions and comes with a nice few apps for really small progrms(like teahing the kids a first0.

If ahrdware allows though, add some eye-candy to the fluxbox and idesk(IMHO just replace).

Noble effort and best of luck!

should i keep the programming programs/aspects on that box as welll or should i have them on a seperate box to save resources? im thinking i could even mod the box to something kiddiish

Depends man, on wht it's going to do but I'd kep them since they take up very litle space.

BTW, what will the kid do with it?

well i've read about programming and can never think of programs to make to practice and i figure the kids would always have some new lesson or thing they were learning i could base programs on. So basically it would be a computer with educational programs that i have developed for the kids to go on and play during a free time period. My plans are to eventually make a website were these programs can be downloaded for free and the source avaible for people to improve.

is there a good program for linux that i could use to make simple animations for the programs to make them flashier?