On Fri, Dec 22, 2000 at 02:13:26AM +0000, John Gay wrote: > Sorry for the silence. I was expecting this would be what was listed in > the site for already packaged.
Nope. Not yet. I'm taking the "bottom up" approach. First, task-jr will contain everything that forms the foundation of a Debian Jr. system (either a dedicated children's box or an existing system on which the children will be granted accounts). > Linuxforkids has quite a bit of stuff listed that would be great for > kids, of course. The Headmaster at my Daughters school is just looking > for any educational-type software. Sure, we extensively make use of Linuxforkids for coming up with new things to package. It's also helpful as a guide for finding things already in Debian that should be added to our list. > Personally, I have found KLyX to be quite good and easy for Text editing and > introducing the concept of TeX type editing rather than 'Word Processing'. For what age range is KLyX suitable? Have you used it with children in our first target age-range, 8 and under? > I find Xsoldier to be quite entertaining and my daughter likes it too. Could you please give a little summary, along the lines of the summaries in our "packaged" list? I'm especially interested in what your daughter thinks of it. > XKoules is another good game, and we can't forget the obligatory > minesweeper. Again, summaries would be helpful. > Doom and Quake are probably a bit too gruesome for under 8's. Agreed. :) > Some good music stuff wouldn't go astray. XMMS should be a must as well as > Timidity++. If we could get a good MIDI writing package, this would help with > music study. I've been working the KDE for Debian crowd to try Brahms, which > seems to be good for what it needed, but there are dependency prob's at the > moment. RoseGarden is closer to what would be useful, but is too bug-ridden to > be any use at all. Yes, I had the same trouble with RoseGarden. I remember many months ago trying Brahms, but at that time KDE wasn't in Debian. It looked promising, though. Again, please provide summaries for xmms and timidity++, giving some guidance as to how these programs are suitable for children, particularly what age children might use them, and any anecdotal material regarding their use from your own experience. > There are quite a few maths packages for various levels, of course this is > second nature for the PC. English and other languages are more difficult to > implement. I know there is an app listed in Linuxforkids that shows quite a > bit > of promise in this area. Sorry I don't have a link, but I don't have Internet > access here at work. It is advertised as a second language tutorial with the > ability to add words and languages fairly easily. Perhaps you mean Qvocab? http://www.qvocab.seul.org/ Or maybe LingoTeach? I can't contact the site, but it is listed as http://lingoteach.xnot.com I am wondering how well LingoTeach runs with kaffe. > Maybe some good reading software would be a good idea as well. I know > emacs supports voice output, but this is rather complex for the under > 8's. Festival would be a good start for a book that reads to you. We > could start with public-domain literature. Clearly some integration work would need to be done before I could recommend festival. Also, parts of it are non-free, so I'd want to be sure that the parts required to assemble a working "talking book" are all in main. > Most of this is based on what I'm looking to incorporate into the network > system > for my daughter's school. KDE provides quite an easy Desktop for the > in-experienced, but is also memory hungry and not useful on lower spec PC's. > Gnome is a little easier on memory, as long as it is not set-up to use > enlightenment WM. I have heard that enlightenment's memory requirements can be reduced considerably by using minimal themes. Debian Jr. is initially focusing on a desktop built around a simple window manager, and is avoiding KDE or Gnome dependence. KDE or Gnome may be used to enhance a Debian Jr. system, but it should be possible for Debian Jr. to be installed without either. > XFCE is a very light-weight Desktop, not W/M that is easy to > use, extremely fast on low memory systems and easy to configure. The down-side > is it takes a bit of configuring before it is very useful. But once set-up, it > supports drag-N-drop and provides a very good and quick interface for a > system. > You might want to consider pre-configuring an XFCE desktop for Debian JR. The > added bonus is it is completely different from the M$ idea of what a desktop > should be. It is based on CDE, which is popular on many UNIX's, especially HP. Ah. I always thought that was an xforms thing, but I see that the xfce in unstable depends on gtk+. Sure, I'd like to give it a try. Is it stable enough? > These are just a few of my suggestions and observations. I'm willing to > provide > what help I can, but I'm not a programmer yet, and know very little about > setting up deb's, but I'm willing to share my experiences and thoughts. Thanks very much for your input. Ben -- nSLUG http://www.nslug.ns.ca [EMAIL PROTECTED] Debian http://www.debian.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] [ pgp key fingerprint = 7F DA 09 4B BA 2C 0D E0 1B B1 31 ED C6 A9 39 4F ] [ gpg key fingerprint = 395C F3A4 35D3 D247 1387 2D9E 5A94 F3CA 0B27 13C8 ]
