On Sat, Sep 09, 2000 at 01:35:04PM +0200, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote: > On Thursday 7 September 2000, at 10 h 37, the keyboard of "Jeffrey F. Cuff" > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > My own kids are Gr. I and IV > > Could people on this international list use ages for the kids, not US-specific > grades? >
Your point is taken, though a parochial frame of reference is not limited to the US (: I and IV are actually =Canadian= (and a particular provincial school jurisdiction at that)) but even when managing to think globally, age designations are bit misleading too, as personal factors vary wildly (which was what i was trying to get around by using grades rather than ages in the 1st place). Which led me to further thought about designing an platform/distribution/UI for a child, whose needs and expectations can be expected to vary more widely over the course of a few years than an adult's will. Particularly, I hearken back to the age of toddler-on-daddys-knee, level of use, when the Delete key (aka "The Eater") was the major application on a character-based terminal. The first application (I wrote specifically for a kid simply displayed whatever was typed in great big letters (10 x 8 on a CGA screen) . This was rapidly superceded once I got Linux and eventually Xwindows. Now it was possible to use xPaint instead, with a huge font size, to deliver essentially the same application: the Eater. Adapting xPaint to become Eater v0.2 involved changing default settings other than font size. Over-maximizing the paint window so that the title bar and resizing bars lay outside the viewport meant that the application was less prone to being accidentaly minimized or terminated. Not a new application, just an adaptation and redeployment of an existing one. All that is needed in a baby-centric distribution in this case is a stub in fvwnrc launching the application in an oversized window at screen negative xy offset. The question I am getting at is whether a kid distribution is just a collection of packages deemed to be of interest/use to kids, or if custom compiled defaults etc for other applications is the also the way to go. The latter is more work to maintain, but if it is not done, the same process and frustrations must be addressed by each parent who attempts to adapt software to a younger than intended user. The Linux for Kids mission statement states that the target audience is "under the age of 10", but it seems to me that it probably means 4-10, with BabyDebian (Linux for Babies?) being a removable customization option ... like bicycle training wheels. *** Speaking of training wheels I've been trying to get a second mouse running under X. Provision for it occurs commented out in XFConfig but uncommenting it, creating /dev/mouse2 and running # gpm -m /dev/mouse -t bare -M -m /dev/mouse2 -t bare doesnt seem to help. I'm certainly no expert in the intricacies of X, but it seemed worth trying, since and "extra" mouse cursor (even a non-clickable one) would be useful in teaching situations (and reduce the finger smudges on the monitor from the teacher pointing at where to click. At the risk of mixing metaphores: it would be even niftier if the second mouse were also functional or over-ride the input to the first mouse (like the second brake in drivers' ed cars). I expect it will happen anyway over the next couple of years, as more people find themselves with an spare com port, this might even drive the creation of a few two mouse applications. Maybe an extra mouse driver needs to be compiled into X? I don't know. But this is the sort of thing which, if enabled in a kids distribution (and documented:) would be useful for adults and children using the same machine together. Another case of extending or reconfiguring existing tools to be more appropriate in a kid environment. My apologies for rambling a bit. It's Friday afternoon and my computer is in pieces with the attempt to get a second DB-9 connector installed to attach the second mouse. Like most parents, this is not the sort of thing I want to try to solve through casual experiment but would certainly be able to use if it were part of the distribution. Suddenly, I really =want= to have two xteddies under the control of two separate mice. ,,,jfc
