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Raspberry PI: A PC for My Son - Part 2

Minecraft Hour of Code on Raspberry PI

In the past, I mentioned a major blocker to setup a minimal Raspberry PI-based PC for my son: Compatibility of Google Child account with the Raspbian OS (default linux distro for Raspberry PI). I mentioned an open source project that deliver Chromium OS on Raspberry PI. This post is to share what I did to rectify the problems before.

I learn that, unless you are heavily invested in Google software and devices, do no setup a child account. You simply just can’t use it.

I am quite certain ChromeOS on actual Chromebook won’t be an issue. Still, I was trying out my luck with Chromium OS to log in via a child account. Nope, it does not work. Period. However, you are still able to log in as a guess user and manually log in via Google services on the Chromium browser. I just feel thto at the experience is too cumbersome, especially if I want to help my son focus on the actual work, rather than wasting time to login to multiple services every single time.

I end up using Chromium OS

The experience in using Chromium OS, especially as a introductory OS to kids, is very welcoming. I am keeping the Raspberry PI as a “dumb terminal” and ensure the actual work are saved to the cloud. Thus, I will just leave it here for now.

Just letting you know that as of today, the latest Chromium OS running on r77, which is quite dated.

So far…

Well, so far it works. My son was playing and learning block coding on https://code.org/minecraft. The early part are just revision for him.

My other son, a 5 year old, use this briefly to complete a couple of questions from his Google Classroom assignments from school. It was a counting exercise and he looks annoyed with different interactivity experience compared to iPad. I think, he would prefer iPad at his age - simpler to interact, simpler to count and still better experience in general.