Politics and related fuss aside, there was an interesting project carried out in my country. The availability of netbooks for all students in basic school (primary studies or whatever you call in your country) at low or or no price depending on the fathers/responsible person income. The product/project was called Magellan named after the famous Portuguese Navigator who first circumnavigate the earth and prove indeed that the Earth was indeed round...
Like I said, politics and publicity stunts aside, the truth is that it made quite an impact on the public school population, and it became a reference. It's not say that it all went well... But in all it was pretty decent effort, with a large impact - it even was exported for Portuguese native language countries and a few Spanish ones (Hugo Chavez was rather enthusiastic about it - go figure)!...
Of course my 5 year old son is still in pre-school (or kinder garden) but immediately notice that his colleagues had something that he had not. And wanted something to play with...
I pick up my wife's obsolete portable (Compaq Pentium II 133 mhz with 64 mb) and removed the win2000 OS and installed AROS (with FFS) and later IcAROS (in SFS), it was a bumpy ride in such a modest setup, but I managed to install, enjoy and write the improved Theme Prefs with it!
Of course my plan was to introduce my son to AROS, and to my surprise he pick it up almost immediately, so it was nice warm and cosy feeling. My son enjoyed it so much that it made me feel that I had a companion at home with a taste for amiga stuff.
Naturally he wanders more in games, but he also uses LunaPaint and Grafx2 (he prefers the latest, quite understandably), and always is on the lookout for all the directory contents to find new stuff.
My point is, young age users are more open than old ones, and while he does not have any amiga background or is fueled by any anti-any-os or architecture, he seems to appreciate more the IcAROS setup than the Windows one (While using them both). I believe in time he will have a more pragmatic and oriented POV, but if he had all the necessary software for his necessities (learning stuff), I'd say he pretty much would prefer any machine with AROS (netbook, portable, or desktop) than any netbook with a cutdown Windows XP version (that's what magellan is - the linux option is just that... an option).
Two weekend ago, thanks to the USB install option I was able to show AROS with sound to my son, and he was happily playing a few of his favourite games with sound output on my Works' Acer travelmate portable. If AROS gets more hardware and software support we can put a lot more happy faces on many kids - of all ages!!
Being a optmistic type and adventurer type sailor guy, I would dare say that Magellan might be more enthusiastic about AROS, than other projects bearing his name...
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