My seven year old compiled his first kernel

[Dapper Dan]

...sure I assisted him, but he downloaded the source, untarred it, copied over the .config file, then compiled and booted into the new 3.0.1 kernel on our CRUX 2.7 machine.

[jayd512]

Outstanding, Dan!
Thtat's just awesome that he is that interested in computers at such a young age.

[rokytnji]

...sure I assisted him, but he downloaded the source, untarred it, copied over the .config file, then compiled and booted into the new 3.0.1 kernel on our CRUX 2.7 machine.

I feel like I'm on the Jeff Foxworthy show "Are you smarter than a 5th grader".

[Dapper Dan]

Roky, he seems to have been born with more natural intelligence than I was. It's humbling but makes me proud at the same time. He likes creating and making things. His favourite computer game is MineCraft (I really like it too!) so compiling a kernel seemed like the most natural progression in his experience with computers.

[Dapper Dan]

Outstanding, Dan!
Thtat's just awesome that he is that interested in computers at such a young age.

Jay, as you know in CRUX, compiling a new kernel is a streamlined, simple operation so that helped too. He's probably not ready to tackle compiling a new kernel in Fedora!

[MASONTX]

Congratulations! He needs to fill in the age poll so we can show 1 in the 10 and under category. It wont be long before he will be teaching us old dogs some new tricks.

[Siddly]

...sure I assisted him, but he downloaded the source, untarred it, copied over the .config file, then compiled and booted into the new 3.0.1 kernel on our CRUX 2.7 machine.

It's usually the 20-somethings that have trouble with Linux, they bring too much baggage with them.
Some years ago at the first IBM Linux Conference in London, Jon "Mad dog" Hall commented on the policy of not allowing anyone under 18 to attend conferences, saying it was a nonsense.
He then related how there was a young lad hanging around outside the Atlanta show (ALS). The lad gingerly approached him and said "Mr. Hall, you don't know me, my name is ......., I don't know if you remember, I am the one who sent you the patch to ----- for the kernel".
Kudos to the 7 year old who submitted the patch which was included in the kernel.
Hats off to 7 year olds, they are the future and I share your pride.

[cousinlucky]

Alright Dan!!

[elija]

At 7 years old all I wanted to do was slide down hills on cardboard sleds. Mind you we didn't have home computers back then

That's really cool Dan!

[ramin.honary]

Cool! When I was 7, I think I was able to boot up my Macintosh IIsi, and run "Hello, world!" in "Mac QBASIC". I didn't even know what a "Kernel" was, but it's my dad's fault for not being a computer genius (although he did teach me QBASIC, I should be thankful for that at least).

Next step: teach your son X86 assembly language. Then teach him why he never needs to write assembly because there is C, and he will see how much easier C is and will truly appreciate the gift of languages like C. Then teach him that he will rarely ever need C because of languages like JavaScript, and he will see how easy JavaScript is and he will truly appreciate the gift of languages like JavaScript.