Re: Debian Jr. and Debian Jr. Lite
On Fri, Dec 08, 2000 at 03:29:19PM -0600, Pat Mahoney wrote:
> > dancing uberboxes. My idea is that a subset of Debian Jr. should be
> > flagged as "Debian Jr. Lite", perhaps assisted by a "task-" package
> > that omits all the heavy-duty 3D and big memory or CPU hog progs.
>
> I think this is a good idea. FYI, there is a big discussion on
> debian-policy (perhaps -devel too by now?) on task packages. So, the
> way tasks work might change in the near future...
>
> Specifically, Joey Hess wants to make less, simpler task packages (like
> task-programming instead of task-python, task-c++-dev, task-c-dev, etc.). I
> haven't read most of it; it is quite long.
Can you summarize for us or at least give references to the archives? I
skimmed some of the thread that spilled over onto debian-devel but I am
unaware of any specific proposals that have been tabled.
> Anyone have any thoughts on how easy to learn pdmenu is for children?
> Perhaps it's bad to not teach the shell, but pdmenu makes all the
> programs easy to find. You can always start a shell from pdmenu. And
> I suppose using X on a more powerful system doesn't teach the shell
> either.
Well, I know Andreas Tille has mentioned his son uses mc, but as I recall,
he is older. I'm not sure about children in the 5 to 8 range. I never
used any such thing with my kids. It was always either bash or X. They
seem to be comfortable with both. R (6) has been a happy bash user since
he was about 3 when we only had a terminal and a largely inaccessible
parent's system (a P100 situated in our room, where the children did not
have free access to it ... this had more to do with space constraints at
the time than anything else). He also uses X and now prefers it. J (2)
uses X exclusively. V and M (9 and 10 respectively) use both bash and X.
They prefer bash when they are composing stories in a text editor (nano)
and to play a few bsdgames, the favourites being boggle and hangman. But
most of the time they like to be in X where they have access to these
things as well as X-based games, toys, gimp, xpaint, and so forth.
> ...the only text based games I have installed are moon-buggy and
> nethack (I guess I should write up some summaries...) Hehe Ben, pdmenu
> has a "Change your password" entry :).
Try out the stuff in bsdgames. I'll have to try moon-buggy on the kids.
> Flin is also an ncurses-based menu shell. Haven't tried it though.
I'd like to hear people's experiences with menu shells and children. So
far, we only list mc. There may be a niche there I am missing.
> BTW, I have no idea what can and can't run on a 486dx/33 (well, I have
> an idea of what can't). I imagine it can run moon-buggy and
> typspeed (I just god hammered by 3133t Monkey :).
Heh. Well, there are desktop toys ... many of those work. Try 'xteddy'
for example. I cannot recommend 'lletters' for Debian lite until the
latest version is packaged for woody, as it has performance issues loading
the images in the current woody version. But that would be another one.
Most arcade games are going to suffer, but a few of them will do fine. I
know 'xbreaky' (i'll have to add this to the list :) is a nice 'breakout'
type game that works OK on a 486dx/66 with a 4M Mach32. I don't actually
have a 'Debian Jr. Ultralight' platform to test it on, though, so I'd like
to hear how well it performs with less memory, a lesser vid card, and a
lesser processor than mine.
> > "Debian Jr. Light"
>
> This is aproximately my system. I run the gimp ok, but I probably have
> more patience than most children. Mozilla definitely is not usable.
> Konqueror is borderline... just don't run anything else. I don't
> really like konqueror, but it is a decent, graphical browser.
I have loaded konqueror on the 486dx/66 and will try it out. It's a shame
it drags so much cruft with it.
> I wish dillo/gzilla/armadillo worked better as they run very smoothly.
Too bad. Are there any smaller alternatives? I heard that recently
konqueror has been ported to run on qt-embedded. Does anyone know about
this version? Is it decoupled from all of that KDE bloat?
Ben
--
nSLUG http://www.nslug.ns.ca synrg@sanctuary.nslug.ns.ca
Debian http://www.debian.org synrg@debian.org
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