Oh, but lest we forget the *first* attempt at a Star Wars television show. It might have been close to 30 years ago, and Lucas may want to officially deny it even exists, but the "Star Wars Holiday Special will forever more be burned into our collective memories. So let's hope the franchise doesn't get that out of hand again.

I built my 4 year old daughter and 2 1/2 year old son a desktop PC with the VIA artigo kit and an LCD monitor, and installed Ubuntu on it. I run the browser through the Dan's Guardian proxy server. The computer is set up in our den, where my wife and I are able to both interact with the kids, and supervise their usage. We limit them to pbskids.org, and nickjr.com. I added some code to the firefox start script that checks for a flag file /tmp/notrightnow, and plays an ogg file of me saying 'not right now kids, maybe later' before exiting, and am working on crontabs to schedule usage times. I think you'd find that a laptop is perhaps too delicate for little hands, and although the little artigo PC is small, it is not portable, so the kids have to stay where they can be supervised. One drawback is that the Nick Jr. website has flash video clips from their TV shows. When the kids get into the clips, we nudge them back to the games. Our intent is to not have the computer turn into another passive video viewing outlet. One other benefit is that I have the kid's computer configured into a print queue on one of my servers. My daughter prints out coloring pages that the different sites offer.

Before we bought the computer for the kids, we gave them the Leap Frog ClickStart, which teaches basic keyboard and mousing skills, as well as spelling, letter, and number recognition. It may be a good starting point for your 2 year-old, but of course your mileage may vary.

I did intentionally start the kids out on a Linux box, and for several reasons. It does a much better job with lower-powered hardware, it is less prone to malware, and it also is cheaper than a windows license.