Qimo is a desktop operating system designed for kids. Based on the open source Ubuntu Linux desktop, Qimo comes pre-installed with educational games for children aged 3 and up. Qimo's interface has been designed to be intuitive and easy to use, providing large icons for all installed games, so that even the youngest users have no trouble selecting the activity they want.
FAQ
Q: How do you pronounce Qimo?
A: The proper way to pronounce Qimo is "kim-oh", as in "eskimo". It does not make use of the typical English pronunciation of "QU" as "qwah".
Q: Why an Eskimo?
A: Our son is Quinn, and it's a referenced to a song written by Bob Dylan and made popular by Manfred Mann in the mid-1960's. Wikipedia notes that the
'subject of the song is the arrival of the mighty Quinn (an eskimo)... who changes despair into joy and chaos into rest, and attracts attention from the animals." We've sung the song to our son since the day he was born, and because the distribution was inspired by him, it seemed only fitting.
Q: What are the hardware requirements for Qimo?
A: Qimo needs a minimum of 256MB of memory to run from the CD, or 192MB to install. At least 6 GB of hard drive space is recommended, and a 400MHz or faster CPU.
Q: How is Qimo different than Edubuntu?
A: Qimo was designed to be a standalone home computer for kids, rather than a networked classroom computer. The interface for Qimo is designed to be easy enough for a 3 year old to use, without having to navigate menus or manage multiple open windows. Also, Qimo will also run from a LiveCD, and doesn't require an existing Ubuntu installation the way Edubuntu does.
Q: Why not use Sugar from the OLPC project?
A: Sugar is a very good interface for the OLPC computers it was made for, but many of the design decisions and interfaces don't work nearly as well on standard PCs. Qimo uses a customized XFCE interface to provide a fast, lightweight, and most importantly an easy to navigate interface that works well with standard computers, monitors and keyboards.
Q: Why do I have a regular Xubuntu desktop instead of the Qimo desktop after I install?
A: The installer automatically creates a limit "qimo" user account, that is set to auto-login by default. Ubiquity will ask you to create an additional account, which will have the default Xubuntu desktop and sudo permissions, this is really for parental use. However, Ubiquity asks if you want to auto-login to that account (something we will be removing in future versions of Qimo), which will log into the parent account, not the Qimo account. If you're getting the Xubuntu desktop, you probably checked this optio nduring the install. You can change that back to logging in as "qimo" from the Login Screen settings.
Q: Why is Qimo4Kids.com running on Windows and .Net?
A:Both the design and hosting for this website is being donated to us by TMR Agency. While they are not a Linux shop, they wanted to be involved in helping us get educational software to kids in the capacity they could. We are extremely fortunate and grateful for the amount of design and development effort they put into our website, as well as their continued hosting space and bandwidth.
