After writing my last post about fostering your child’s inner geek, I developed a brainstorm to fix up an old laptop of mine and give it to my son’s friend Elijah.  The hinges on it were cracked, and I had dreams for it to become a xubuntu steampunk laptop. Well, after some serious thought, I realized that I didn’t have the wherewithal to make a steampunk laptop, so off I went to Ebay to find an old Dell 5000e shell, which arrived in the mail two days ago.  I eagerly unpacked the laptop carcass and went to work with my teensy little screw driver.  The screen housing was carefully taken apart and replaced along with a new keyboard to boot.  This model of Dell is very prone to cracked hinges. Even the replacement has hairline cracks on each side. It has an operational battery that holds a charge though — bonus!

Apps:

For your researching pleasure, here is a list of free applications that were installed on this machine. This will give you an idea of what applications you may wish to install with your young one.

Bluefish – Basic web design application

Aptana – Web development application

Kompozer – Another basic web design application

Gedit – My favorite code editor

Notepad++ – Another lightweight code editor

Mozilla Firefox – Web browser

Flock Browser – A really fun browse that supports firefox addons, as it has the same “bones”

Chrome Browser – Lightning fast!

Fireftp – FTP Client for uploading files to the web

Firebug – Browser based code inspector that allows one to inspect and edit a website’s code from a browser

The Gimp – Graphic Design Application

PSPI Gimp Plugin – Allows one to use Photoshop brushes in Gimp

Brushes – Just a few extras to make things exciting

Colorpix – An amazing little app by the makers of colourlovers

Fonts – I couldn’t resist

Pidgin – Couldn’t forget a light weight multi client instant messaging program!

Open Office – A free office suite

So I’m already planning/preparing for the next laptop gift giveaway for geeky minded kids. I’m going to scout the web for good deals on old hardware. The next machine  will be running a lightweight flavor of linux such as xubuntu.  All in all this will turn out to be a nice machine for Elijah, oh and maybe his mom too!

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About the author

Su - is a freelance web developer for StarSunflower Studio, LLC. Her interests include spending time with her son Jasper, geekery, indie crafts, wild edibles and medicinals.