This story talks about kids getting on line before age 5. My two sons – 7 and 5 – are indeed part of that generation. The have access to the net via a Red Hat Desktop 4 and a Fedora Core 3 machine each. What they are also able to do is to use which ever monitor/keyboard and if that monitor/keyboard is attached to a machine which is not what they want to log in into, they hit F10 and use XDMCP to get to the machine they way. It is so good to seem them being skillful and productive – albeit going to the web and bookmarking a tonne of sites for games.

You know what – it just ocurred to me that probably 99% of the readers would NOT be able to understand what XDMCP is all about. Simply – it a way to connect to any Linux (or Unix for that matter) machine that is on the same LAN *without* having to go in front of the machine. Sorta, kinda like VNC, but different yet. I have set up FreeNX on these machines as well which allows me to get to my home machines via a secure shell link and get the graphical desktop. I bet that by the time my 5 year old is in Primary 6, he would probably be using stateless Linux as a given.