TuxMath and some other suggestion

General Linux Help
1

Six months ago I was on a hunt for a distro for my six year old. Checked out DouDou Gondwana, but was keen to have it permanently installed on a 5 year old laptop, so had to settle on Qimo, which probably is not being developed anymore.
Tried the Hyperborea version and it is awesome, well done!!!

Few suggestions:

  1. Pleeeease include Tux Math as part of the distro.
  2. Some older wifi chips do not work unless additional drivers are downloaded, a simple FAQ to help non Linux-savvy users
  3. launcher.xml is not very intuitive to edit, if a new application is added, a small guide would be extremely useful.

Thanks
Sid

2

Great if you love Hyperborea!

Here are my comments:

  1. Tux Math has not been evaluated as being a must have, compared to educational suites that are in DoudouLinux. If you absolutely want TuxMath, well, install DoudouLinux then install it!
  2. As we do not have computers requiring specific drivers, it is very difficult for us to explain what users in this situation should do. If you have such information, please give it us and we’ll update our website. All we can do is to try to provide all the drivers and firmware available within Debian.
  3. Yes, we know… We’d like someone to write a graphical application to edit this XML file.

Cheers,
JM.

3

Great if you love Hyperborea!

Here are my comments:

  1. Tux Math has not been evaluated as being a must have, compared to educational suites that are in DoudouLinux. If you absolutely want TuxMath, well, install DoudouLinux then install it!
  2. As we do not have computers requiring specific drivers, it is very difficult for us to explain what users in this situation should do. If you have such information, please give it us and we’ll update our website. All we can do is to try to provide all the drivers and firmware available within Debian.
  3. Yes, we know… We’d like someone to write a graphical application to edit this XML file.

Cheers,
JM.

Thanks for the response. I have installed TuxMath and works well, and TuxType too… Had to do some tweaks in the .desktop file to get it out of the Math folder and display directly on the desktop.

I can understand your comment around drivers. An IT (and Linux) savvy parent should be able to install missing drivers, it is the one who just want it to work will have the trouble. I’ll gather the instructions for making it run broadcom specific drivers, and will post it in the forum.

4

I just started playing with doudoulinux and I think it’s great. I was going to roll my own kid-friendly version, but now I don’t have to!

Anyway, I wanted to install other programs such as tuxmath, etc. And I figured out how to change menus. So here’s what you have to do:

From the command prompt, you can 'sudo apt-get install … ’ whatever you want.
Some of these programs will create .desktop files in the /usr/share/applications directory. Tuxmath will.
if you edit these files, you’ll see that they have the name of the app in lots of different languages, the command to execute, a short description, an icon file/description (haven’t figured out how that works yet), and categories separated by semi-colons.

These .desktop files are needed to make an application appear on the desktop. If you install a program that doesn’t create one, just copy another .desktop file and edit it.

Configuring the desktop:

Doudoulinux uses lxde as the desktop. Each ‘activity’ from the activities menu is really a user. The activities menu is the login screen is disguise (clever).

So to change the setup for the diffent options (mini, kid, whole, etc.), you’ll need to go to the home directory for that user, edit /home/{user}/.config/lxlauncher/launcher.menu

It’s an xml file and you should be able to figure it out pretty well. Within menus, sometimes you’ll see categories listed, which will pull all the .desktop files in that particular category. You’ll also see <Filename>…</Filename> tags where you can place a specific .desktop file to make it show up.

So if you wanted tuxmath to show up somewhere, you’d enter <Filename>tuxmath.desktop</Filename> in the appropriate place in the xml.

If you don’t want a specific file to show up and it’s showing up because it’s category is listed, you can put something like <Not><Filename>Idon’twantthisone.desktop</Filename></Not> to not show it… <Not></Not> around categories works too.

Hope that helps…