(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Cant wait to see it Sidders, keep up the good work

I was too lazy to istall gcompris and all those dependecies..so I downloaded this iso instead for my daughters...just wanna say thanks sidders..

question: please do tell if any other kids games available for puppy (dependencies included or just work in hansamben)

thanks

Trio.

The games were pulled from all sort of sources, and put together on a Puppy base.

The games i made into Pets, i have posted on the forum:

Dos games: http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=42119
These need dosbox to run, which you can get from here: http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=27600
On the above link it will also give you a link to SDL which is required for Dosbox.

Ri-li:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=38517

This needs SDL and SDL-mixer

Tuxtype, math and sdl libs:


http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=37419

The Puppy games thread where you can get a lot more games:

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/index.php?f=38

Hope this gives you a start.

Sidders

Here it is. v0.02

Changes\improvements\fixes

Gcompris:Added Gst-plugin-good, this enabled sound on the Discovery and ABC- Click on the letter activities.
Took the "test" folder out of Python to reduce its size.

Other games:

Added Dosbox and 3 dos games - Aj's world of discovery, Playroom and Fatty Bears Birthday Surprise.

Edit: Please note with the Dosbox games, as Sully has pointed out, to run the games in full screen, you end up with a huge black border. I will tweak and twiddle the Dosbox.conf and PM Musher0, he seems to be knowledgable on the subject of dosbox and has downloaded Aj's world it can be improved.


There was a lot of reading involved with the others. Some i rejected due to the very poor sound (some sounded
like Stephen Hawkins on helium)

Stickers. A story board sort of game, you can dress up tux as well. The game looks really good for kids, could probably do with some work
on it, if i ever learn Python.........

R&D: see previous posts


General feel: A happy bouncy wallpaper and a chunkier mouse cursor.

Other:
Ripped the guts out of the network. Removed network drivers, Pwireless the network wizards,
IPtables, Firewall, WPA-supplicant, ppoe client etc etc.

Removed Firepup

After all that i was stumped with CUPS.
Added Netsurf (its small and supports Bareview)
Stuck a line in /etc/rc.d/rc/local "ifconfig lo 127.0.0.1"

Edited the purple screen that comes after "do you want to add a printer" and before the CUPS web interface.

The size is now down to 204mb

http://www.filefactory.com/file/ag1d318 ... _2-412_iso

Keep talking[/b]

Awesome sidders! I do so love this project and appreciate all your hard work. I just d/l'd the distro and loaded it up. I've got a couple of quick thoughts and questions based on first impressions....

sidders wrote: Gcompris:Added Gst-plugin-good, this enabled sound on the Discovery and ABC- Click on the letter activities.
Took the "test" folder out of Python to reduce its size.

I'm still playing with Gcompris and want to get a good handle on it as this is really the 'guts' of the distro IMO. I'm going to see what kind of documentation I can get on it and then go from there.

sidders wrote: Other games:
Added Dosbox and 3 dos games - Aj's world of discovery, Playroom and Fatty Bears Birthday Surprise.

These look like great choices sidders, but is it possible to run them in a window or full screen? On my machine they boot in to a little screen with a huge black background. Also, if you have links for documentation on any of these games, that would be helpful.

sidders wrote: Stickers. A story board sort of game, you can dress up tux as well. The game looks really good for kids, could probably do with some work
on it, if i ever learn Python.........

Haven't got to these yet, but looking forward to it!

sidders wrote: General feel: A happy bouncy wallpaper and a chunkier mouse cursor.

Excellent choice on these!

Too fun!
Sully

Sully

I've had a quick look for documentation on the Gcompris site, its more techy rather than end user documentation. There maybe more with Edubuntu.

The Dos games were tricky. They still need playing about with. I only opted for the full screen so the little ones cant start 5 other apps and crash the whole thing. With Plyroom for example i could get a fullscreen, but i looked "Blockish". I also ran Aj'S world on an old Dell Latitude (500mhz CPU and 4mb video card) and it failed to run, so i deliberatley set it to 640x480. I copied a review of the Dos games, they are in the My-documents folder.

My little one love Fatty Bear. I'll keep plugging away.

PS. With the ABC games and sound etc. I couldnt get them to work on the previous version, so i hid them

Hi Sidders, first of all, a big thanks!

I also have some questions.
1. "Ripped the guts out of the network. Removed network drivers ..."
Does this mean we can't do networking connections, or it would now be harder?

2. "Removed Firepup."
Isn't Firepup a good-enough browser, since it supports most of the plugins of Firefox, like relatively newer flash plugin? You see, aside from the games you included, we sometimes play online games in the internet, mostly flash games. I fear that by removing Firepup, we might not be able to play those flash games anymore?

3. "Added Netsurf"
I checked Netsurf, and a page says that the 32bit Flash Player Plugin
Version 0.411.1.1 is still since 29 November 2004. So I worry that it might not be able to play relatively new flash games in the internet?

4. "(its small and supports Bareview)"
What is Bareview? Why is it important in this kind of educational distro? When I googled it, I saw at least 2 softwares.

Thanks again!

smdelfin

There is no networking ,including internet, in this one, hence the removal of Firepup (i do like firepup). The only reason it was replaced wih Netsurf was for the CUPS printer interface.

I asked about Bareview. Ttuxxx replied:

Bareview is just a small front end to the seamonkey browser, same with mozgtk, they are browsers without any real extras, like file/edit/go/bookmarts/tools/window/help etc

. It doesnt have any navigation buttons.

If you want networking and internet i will quite happily post one with all the networking components. The reason why it was dropped was, the nurseries (certainly in the UK) dont access the inernet and if its run as a Livecd, the size is kept down and they can always go on Daddies Xp machine to access the internet.

Let me know. Sidders

We have some private preschools that have internet access. Actually, some of the students don't have internet access at home, so they only experience internet in school. Most of the games are flash-based, like online dress-up games, Dora and Diego, and others. So internet access and networking are important to us.
I don't want to impose so I won't be asking for a current version with networking. Besides, we are perfectly happy with your earlier version. But, if you will release a future version with networking, we would appreciate that very much.
I plan on creating a video about your pupplet and post it on youtube. I would show-off the modern features we use in spite of very old hardware. I would just emphasize that its for an earlier version. I just hope the links to your earlier release are still alive because others with my same needs might want to give it a try also.

Again, thanks!

smdelfin

I will take the origonal and put on the additional games and software, but leave the network and firepup in.

I'll post it this weekend and PM you.

Sidder

PS. The first iso still exists at the same location

Sidders THANK YOU!!!!! I am downloading now. I cant wait to see it! It will be going into the preschool here on Monday.



There is obviously still a need to have internet access for some scenarios. Could the networking/browser components be included in a separate .sfs? Just an idea?

Just some more news...I got a call from a local primary school (ages 4-11) with 17 older p.c.'s.

Sometimes I pick up older p.c.'s from schools, refurb with puppy and sell them on for £20-£30 apiece (I do it for free, but other companies charge the school about £10 disposal fee). From what I could gather, they were going to be spending thousands on a new computer suite (running windoze) to replace these computers.

I told them about HanSamBen and said I would give them a demonstration on 9th June after the half term break. Im doing some work at the moment with netbooting at a Seamans Mission cybercafe, and believe I could use the same technology with HSB to refurbish this suite....these are just thoughts for the moment though. Will report back later.

4-11. I'll see what can be added and taken away, suite the age group.

SFS. I've never made one before, but it looks straight forward enough. I'll have a go.

Thanks Sidders, but dont change the whole setup of the thing because Im not sure how the demo is going to go. Would be useful to have some knowledge of some games for older kids though (I know gcompris is 2-12).

The age range 4-11 is a big one, you could maybe pitch it at 4-7 for example. Will these dos games be of any interest:
.http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=42119

Your attention please people. A big note on the Dosbox games. I have spent a couple of hours playing with the dosbox games. in particular the issue with full screen. A lot depends on the amount of pixelatiion your happy with in a way. This is all controlled via the /root/dos_emul/gamename/gamename.conf.

The particular section is [render]. the scaler option is set to the default none. This can be changed to normal1x or normal3x for example. Its what ever you and your kids\nurseries etc are happy with. I'm afraid i dont have a definitive answer, so some feedback please.

I made a couple of tweaks to it:
added custom control panel
removed network kernel modules
deleted static libraries (.a and .la)
deleted extra locales
deleted cups
deleted netsurf
removed extra locales
modified startup to skip kb & mouse
deleted extra documentation
replaced some large files with symlinks to duplicates or other compatible
removed some ntfs tools to prevent kids from damaging a windows install
removed other unuseful programs
simplified menu
some more stuff to make it 2-3yr old friendly (my kids ages)


I think you may be able to remove *.pyc and *.pyo files - haven't tested

... currently uploading - with my connection it should be up sometime tomorrow

It's up now and weighs in at ~174mb - I have no blank cds with me so haven't tested the iso but did a manual frugal install and it worked well

I decided not to remove the pyc and pyo files so that they wouldn't take up additional space in the pupsave file when created and also to help out with slower cpus

http://puppylinux.asia/members/T/puplet ... _alpha.iso

the secret codes are puppy and linux

Good work technosaurus, what locale is the keyboard set to now...not that it really matters so much for a kids distro as long as it is vaguely English.

Im downloading it now to give it a spin, along with the full install.

Ive mentioned .sfs addons before...could printing be an .sfs module like the internet/networking modules?

@ Sidders

Yes, it is a big age range, Im not sure that were going to get anywhere with it (the UK School system is tied in very much with Micro$oft), I would say progress as we are and keep this for the little ones until we know for sure.

I had some problems like Micko1, with the pup_save.2fs from other puppy installs being overwritten. Im going to make those tweaks to change the name of the file it looks for.

I have it defaulting to US and automatic mouse detection...
I wanted it to automatically go to Xvesa, but I haven't quite figured that out yet.
Either way you can change it in Setup from the menu.

Note: you can run fixmenus so that the Setup program is no longer accessible to the kiddies. (you can always access it by hitting "!" in a ROX folder and typing "pcp" in the box that appears at the bottom ... same goes for any of the other programs)

btw I also removed gparted since that could really cause problems. I just use a different puplet if I need to change any partitioning.

Hmmmm....xvesa could hurt the little ones eyes as it only displays at a very low refresh rate Perhaps an automatic xorg 800x600? If you leave the original xorgwizard script intact, changes could be made using the [ctrl]+[alt]+[bkspace]-xorgwizard method, which would leave all the origional functionality intact.

I would be very interested in you updated xorgwizard script when you have doe for some other projects I have on. I would much appreciate a little explanation/run through of the changes you have made.

Ive started a project to auto-install a puppy on a dedicated machine I hope sidders will include in one of the later versions...it will basically wipe the machine of all data and turn it into a dedicated HSB only machine...good for schools getting rid of old computers (which they currently here in the UK have to pay for), or for people wishing to give their old p.c. to their kids.

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=42660

So gparted is definetely something that needs to go!

Ive only had chance to give HSB a very brief spin so far because Im on a deadline for the Mission cybercafe project...but something I thing would be needed is some desktop shortcuts for the many programs. Kids this age havnt really developed the "mouse dexterity" (at least on their first boot of hsb ) to navigate to the "fun" menu yet.

Thank you for contributing your considerable expertise to this project technosaurus.