GCompris, ChildsPlay, KTuberling, Debian XFCE on 512MB RAM
 

After some hurdles, I had a good install experience and good outcome. More importantly, my 4-year-old daughter enjoys having her own computer (no Internet connection) and playing these games. And when I was on LQ the other day, she said something like, "Those penguins are the same penguins in my games!" looking at the 4 penguins in the upper left. She sat on my lap and asked me about the question marks and light bulb. She doesn't play excessively, maybe 2-3 hours per week. She can even log in now. Having speakers enhances or is essential for some of the games.

The process started a little rough. I had an old computer sitting around. 512MB of an older type of RAM, has a floppy drive too, can't boot from USB only CD. Tried Tahr Puppy and it wouldn't boot up. Tried Slacko Puppy and it booted but the hard drive install failed. I later read that you're not supposed to save session during install. Too late because after that the live Puppy would not recognize the hard drive. On top of this my daughter complained about the logo because she doesn't like dogs and kept insisting that there shouldn't be a dog on her computer. So I did the netinstall of Debian with XFCE desktop and it all went smoothly. It runs surprisingly well on this ancient machine. Sometimes Gcompris won't start, it's about 50/50 so we just log out and log in again. The on button takes a few tries. I might need to replace that if it's failing. But overall it works great!