Lately I have been showing a lot of younger kids how to program in scheme. This means I have been setting up a lot of older laptops with linux + dr scheme as that is the ideal environment for books like the little schemer, how to design programs etc. I have to say that it feels like there should be a MUCH lighter way to accomplish this. I understand dr scheme can do a lot of cool graphical stuff too but I would LOVE it if there was a linux distro that had nothing except for a lisp/scheme interpreter like this + ncurses dr scheme type interface. This way it would run on next to nothing hardware and not run into so many strange hic-ups w/ x on spurious hardware.
A moleskine tablet like you mention with an external rollout keyboard would be so ideal. I'm not asking for a lisp-all-the-way-down (well I would like that too) OS but it would be rad if someone rolled a x-less version of ubuntu or what not w/ the exclusive purpose of teaching/learning scheme.
Arch Linux is a nicely stripped down linux distro. Provided you could find or write a nice ncurses interface for scheme, you could probably build such a system on top of Arch.
I use Arch and Musca (a relatively new, very minimal tiling window manager) on an eee pc 1000 HE and it works extremely well.
A moleskine tablet like you mention with an external rollout keyboard would be so ideal. I'm not asking for a lisp-all-the-way-down (well I would like that too) OS but it would be rad if someone rolled a x-less version of ubuntu or what not w/ the exclusive purpose of teaching/learning scheme.