.nl
Linux user since 2009, stayed with Fedora ever since (and I like it!).
Interested in Open Source Way of doing things, sharing ideas and solutions. Focus on human aspects rather than bits & bytes. Favour nifty tools like markdown, newsbeuter and grep.
Learned the command line through breaking my system and annoying my house mates -- but also used CLI to get it running again ;-)
Authored Comments
It took me to my mid-30's to discover that I have a hacker-way of thinking myself, so being very much aware of that I also like my children to charish and develop this gift. Exploring in whatever way is very important. Not only outdoors, joining the scouts, (indeed) having a pocket knife and getting their boots full of water, mud or dung, but also indoors exploring tools, woodwork and home computer. Want to try the old hand drill? See an interesting computer program? Use it! Try it! Find out!
Sharing thoughts, ideas and prototypes like Lego-builds is also important. This way they will notice that sharing brings new possibilities and can speed up development of sunday morning spacecrafts. Besides they learn to negociate over building blocks. Cooperation and having your own part in it is very important.
Basic computer skills are like reading, writing and math. When they want to use the computer they may because nowadays a PC is what paper, pencil and board game was 40 years ago. At school they train basic things, here at home they can go further. The youngest one starts with Gcompris--a great set of programs to learn and explore. The older ones are less easy to stimulate to try more intelligent games than shoot'em up though, but programming languages with pre defined command blocks (like Scratch or on the Lego Mindstorms) can keep them busy for a long time. Because schools are Microsoft-dominated here in the Netherlands, at home they have the opportunity to try the same functionality in a different way using Linux. This makes them more flexible using computer software and less scared to try. And when my 7 year old son wants to be a 'real hacker' I'll let him do the update on the command line (made <em>me</em> a hacker he told me).
Well, I guess they will make it ;-)