Re: task-jr available for testing
Sorry for the silence. I was expecting this would be what was listed in the site
for already packaged. 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.
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'.
I find Xsoldier to be quite entertaining and my daughter likes it too. XKoules
is another good game, and we can't forget the obligatory minesweeper. Doom and
Quake are probably a bit too gruesome for under 8's.
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.
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. 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.
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. 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.
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.
Cheers,
John Gay
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