Let me say up front that I like the LXDE desktop. It’s clean, and more importantly, it’s fast — those applications which were sluggish under KDE 4 really zip under LXDE. So I’m willing to invest some effort to make this work.

There’s a new version of Easy Debian in Extras-testing that has a much better method for getting the keyboard working in LXDE after the PR 1.2 firmware update changed things.

Easy LXDE is a DebianPureBlends project launched in 2009 for making a distribution of Linux which is easy, especially for the new user.

So it’s rather puzzling to me I’ve never installed Debian. I honestly don’t know why I haven’t. Maybe I thought stable software was old and boring, and unstable was dangerous and to be avoided.

I was very happy that Debian Lenny had Live LXDE Desktop CD. I had tried it briefly earlier. Today I decided to use the persistent mode i.e. changes saved in live-rw file and used on reboot.

Qimo itself — which is to say, the idea of Qimo as a collection of software aimed at kids — isn’t hard to duplicate. And that fact, combined with my desire to take the Debian 5-LXDE CD for a spin, convinced me to come up with my own rendition of the Desktop for Kids.

Last month Knoppix 6.0 was released, and it’s even faster and prettier than earlier versions. But it’s still designed to run well on older and slower computers. Among the changes in version 6.0 is the switch from the KDE desktop environment to the LXDE graphical environment.