http://www.edubuntu.org/

Targets 5-12 year olds, I am definately curious.

I think I'll install it on a old harddrive and poke around a little when i get some time, it's a neat idea.

hmmm....maybe they are actually tring to get Linux looked at from an early age...not a bad idea. I'm still waiting for my free ubuntu disks...its been over a month.

wow after looking at it i might have to download it and install it on an old 4 gb hard drive...I have kids and just maybe they can use some of those programs on there...won't get time probably till break or even after school ends in april.

how hard is it to use linux?
ive been seriously thinking about trying it out.
im a real tinkerer........so i dont mind spending hours and hours making something just right.
i was thinking about putting it on a different hard drive to see what i could do.
any suggestions?

Linux is really easy to use.

Once it is installed it is very difficult to "break" without root access, which apart from installing things and changing system settings should not be used.

I set it up in a student lab here because I didn't want to have to maintain them, been almost a year and they have had 0 problems.

Thats said, setting it up can be tricky, sometimes it is very easy, but if you have non-standard hardware. Which is where the problems usually come from, hardware manufacturers failing to provide drivers and reverse engineered ones not always being available, or not being very good.

That said, the only harware problem I've had was my NVidia card looked up one or two versions of NVidia's supplied drivers. Not a major problem as I just used a older version until they fixed the problem.

Wireless is often tricky though.

I'd reccomend Ubuntu or even Fedora for beginners, they both have some really excellent installation guides. Some of the other distro's might as well, but those ones I can point to without searching :)