[FOR TESTING] Gcompris 8.4.6 SFS for 4.x series Beta

[ecomoney]

Update:

Beta Packages now available

http://ljfr2.perso.neuf.fr/GcomprisSFS

"All in one" single gcompris.sfs package for 4 series (Dingo),

http://ljfr2.perso.neuf.fr/GcomprisSFS/ ... ompris.sfs

"Split" packages with separate locales/sound files for other languages

http://ljfr2.perso.neuf.fr/GcomprisSFS/split/

Mirrors

http://www.ecomoney.eu/puppy/sfs/gcompris - Ecomoney Systems Worldwide Mirror

Please download for testing and report bugs/issues/opinions on this thread.

origional request
Hi, during a recent scouting trip into Ubuntu territory, I discovered just how much the supurb childrens educational suite Gcompris has come on in recent years.

GCompris Website

I look after the I.T. a local preschool, where they run two puppy powered PC's. Their main application is gCompris, but it is a very old version from three or four years ago. The chess game and the wires/bulbs/batteries dont work because it need gnuChess and gnuCap libraries. The puppy version in use is 2.15ce based Ecopup, modified with a kids theme. Puppy 2.15ce does not work/could not be got working with USB printers, so the kids cannot currently print out their drawings to take home since their old serial printer wore out.

Overall though, they are very proud of their Linux P.C.'s, and have asked our local council to look into linux for older schoolchildren in our area. We had to put a second computer in because the kids were squabbling over the one they had.

Our government has unfortunately been duped into a new contract that schools must purchase a Microsoft License for every computer it has, whether it is running Windows or not...or even if it is an Apple Mac. Currently in the area schools are paying to dispose of P4 2.8/512/40gb computers as "waste" because they wont run Windows Vista. Thankfully this does not apply to nursery education...yet.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/educ ... 063716.stm
http://opensourceschools.org.uk/becta-n ... osoft.html

The nursery has already passed several inspections from our inspectors at OFSTED, where their I.T. provision was marked with an "A", (the inspectors had never even heard of Linux before!) Im planning on getting some people in to do some studies into the preschool and publish the results as an example of how to save money AND provide better education to kids. Maybe we can get an A+ next time

Nursery education below age 3 is not paid for at all in Britain, and very minimally funded after that. The lack of I.T. overheads at the preschool means that the prices can be kept to an absolute minimum for the many low income families in the area. We do not charge a fee for looking after the computers, but the nursery agree to give one free child place a year in return. This originally went to our company secretaries child, but since she is now eligeable for funding the place is now given to another local child from a low-income home who has shown a particular gift for computers, but was struggling with his communication skills.

Gcompris is also very popular locally for kids home P.C.'s

I understand Gcompris takes a lot of skill to compile and package up....so here is some thanks in advance from a previously puppy-educated year of Children....



Write up of the story on our website here...

[magerlab]

gcompris is the only programm i miss to have in puppy( even as a BIG sfs)
so i have to use sidux for it

[sidders]

I have a Edupup installation (on trial) ina nursery, with a veiw to get it in another 2 nurseries it has Gcompris on an old machine 128ram hdd install. The kids love it apparently.
It has Gcompris , supertux, Ri-li, Childsplay, Tuxmath and type, bugsquish, Concentration and other bits. They have said that some of the apps are a bit too difficult. Iwill get more info on which and post here.

I am also putting together a live cd from barebones 412 with gcompris on. The /usr/local/share/gcompris/boards/voices is about 50mb on its own. I removed all the languages with the exception of English and it reduced the size by 42mb. I will have to have a play and see if there are any adverse effects, apart from setting the localisation in the admin console. Again i will keep you informed

I used the gcompris 8.4.2 pet from http://www.giovelug.org/
The method to install is on http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=34135

I used Glsapt4 from this thread http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=28994 for the slackware packages (Pycairo, Pysqlite etc) and removed Gslapt after.

PS. I have done this on Edupup 3.01 and a Barebones 4.12

[sidders]

Forgot to mention. The nursery applied for a grant to Rossendale council (i asume it is them as the nursery is in that area). They plan to upgrade their kit at HQ and the old kit will hopefully come to me as a result of this trial and i can Puppyfy them and get them into the other 2 nurseries, in different areas. This grant may be available in your area Ecopup.
I will see if i can get more details from the owners.

PS. there is a 8.5 prebuild out there. I am going to wait and see and then have a go at making a pet out of that.

[ecomoney]

Hi Sidders

It seems were involved in very similar work! I too have helped Antonio in the past with hosting and testing...in fact it seems that many of the packages I need are hosted ON MY OWN WEBSERVER!!!

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=24465

However Gcompris is not one of them. Im currently looking at creating a new Ecopup 8 series distro (with a selection of kids games built in including gcompris) based on 4.2 or later. I wouldnt want to convert the kids over to a setup without gCompris at the moment because they are in the middle of working their way through it. They also have supertux 1, tuxpaint, tuxmath and tuxtype, supertux and tuxpaint being the ones they use the most.

Like I mentioned, I also collect from the local schools, and have quite a few (actually about 30!) P4/2.6/512/40gb Stone Desktop computers, and also a few smaller footprint 2.4 celeron/1gb/40gb desktop machines that just fly with any version of Puppy Linux on them. We also have a whole stack of keyboards/monitors and optical mice.

By the sounds of it, your short of hardware and were short of software. Bolton is basically just the other end of the M62 from us (were based in Scunthorpe for our sins), and I have a very economical car.

Perhaps we can annoy the banks a little more effectively than those on the BBC news today by doing a little bartering?

[sidders]

Let me give you my background. School> Squaddie (9 years) > Textiles (saw the writing on the manufacturing wall)> did a few MCP's and became a Helpdesk Monkey at Shell > Disappeared to South America for 9 months> IT support at a housing association, then back to Shell> had a kid and gave up work to be a full time dad, before you know it i've got 3 under 3!.> Had the Snip.
Since returning from South America, wireless was hitting the market so i set myself up settting wireless networks up for people until i found a job, but carried on, it invariably ended up doing all things M$ a peoples homes and my name got around and i look after a couple of small business's and a guy who has 3 private nurseries. I kept hold of a couple of old machines, but space is limited.
Tired of M$ and clearing up peoples viruses etc, i plumbed for Puppy as it will run on old hardware. Ubuntu (as someone in another postted pointed out) is brown and still requires a fair bit of Ram and countless updates are thrown at you. Came across Puppy in particular Edupup, Recycle + Open source + kids = perfect.

Thats my life story. I have just concentrated on the kids machines. The one on trial in one of the nurseries is Edupup with Tuxpuck, Tuxtype, Tuxmath, Childsplay, Abiword. I added Gcompris 8.4.2, Ri-li, Concentration, Bugsquish, Supertux.

Put a shortcut to /usr/x11R7/bin/wmpoweroff on the desktop and put a nice shut down symbol on it. I then hid all the menus, including Start by editing In a previous trial i discovered kids have a renamed /etc/xdg/templates/_jwmrc.root (to origonal) # everything else out.
Apart from My docs and the apps, there is nothing else left on the desktop. I also edited /etc/profiles and # by Touch boot.cnt (or something), then deleted /tmp/boot.cnt, then if the system crashes due to kids abillty to quadrouple click it will boot back to the desktop.

I will see if i can make Pets from the slackware dependencies (Pycairo etc)

I am also going to research the governments policy on IT for pre-schoolers. I do know they expect a kid to be able to use a mouse and open a program by the time they are 4.

I will stop waffling now.

[ecomoney]

Thats totally how I came to puppy linux (without the snip or the kids on the way). I tried ubuntu too but yes, it still needs new computers to run and as Ive found its quite unreliable.

Let me know if you need any of this gear I have spare

Good news is...I found a gcompris .pet here

http://www.giovelug.org/index.php?lng=e ... indice&c=5

This seems to work..at least without sound, on puppy 4.2. It throws many errors about missing dependencies when run from the command line. Also it is missing the chess libraries (gnuchess) and probably some others.

[pcampbell87]

I am fairly bored and need things to kill the 51 days until I join the Royal Marines so I will have a go at compiling a .pet of this tonight - unless you have been able to get the version you found working correctly.

Edit: I note that the latest version is 8.4.12, do you specifically need 8.3.11?

[ecomoney]

Any recent version would be fine thank you! I have no/very little idea about the libraries or how to compile. Many thanks

[sidders]

i have gnuchess, i think i got it from www.puppylinux.ca, however if you cant find it, let me know and i will upload it to my 123 drive.

The dependencies can be covered from Gslapt the slackware tool

Pcambell87, a Bootneck. Respect and Good luck with that. I did the all arms commando course way back when. Apart from the pain, i do remember that the food was good at Lympstone.

Enjoy

[pcampbell87]

The dependencies are more of a pain than I had hoped... I have got most of them sorted but esound is giving me an error and google hasn't been much help - I will give it another go tomorrow.

Sidders: The food is pretty good, I think that's half the reason I am rejoining (I was previously medically discharged), I can't wait!

[technosaurus]

I have an esound pet package here... been compiling wine against it without error
http://puppylinux.asia/members/T/486_pet/
L:puppy
P:linux

[ttuuxxx]

If I had the time I would compile it, But I don't, It would take a couple of days, The best way to do thisfor 4 series+ is basically
Download it and all the Dependant packages from Ubuntu Gutsy, Its the closest match to puppy 4.2.
http://packages.ubuntu.com/gutsy/games/gcompris
I would download
http://packages.ubuntu.com/gutsy/i386/gcompris/download
and
http://packages.ubuntu.com/gutsy/all/gc ... a/download
first then make a pet package and install it. It will tell you the missing libs, then go back to the gutsy/Gcompris page and download the corresponding missing packages, then uninstall your first test, and install the more actual one version 2. If you missing anything, it should be on one of the lib pages. If your still missing anything, just tell me and I'll see what I can do to help in the end.
ttuuxxx

Ps would be easier with Spup or Dpup and just install it with the package manager
ttuuxxx

[ecomoney]

Thanks for your help guys, I wont profess to know what on earth your talking about but it sounds like your making good progress.

@pcampbell87, making a superb childrens educational suite available to the worlds poorest is worthy work indeed. Its a shame that the food and wages arnt as good as in the military.

[pcampbell87]

I have built all the dependencies from source (all 40 of them!) however I am now getting an error 'cannot find -lpython2.6' when trying to make gcompris. I compiled python 2.6 from source when building the dependencies so I must have done something wrong at some point - back to the drawing board

[ttuuxxx]

I have built all the dependencies from source (all 40 of them!) however I am now getting an error 'cannot find -lpython2.6' when trying to make gcompris. I compiled python 2.6 from source when building the dependencies so I must have done something wrong at some point - back to the drawing board

make sure you have this folder and its .h files inside of it
/usr/include/python2.6
if its called anything else system link it to /usr/include/python2.6
also if your compiling python why not just use the one which came with the compiler? 2.5? that should of worked.
ttuuxxx

[pcampbell87]

if your compiling python why not just use the one which came with the compiler? 2.5? that should of worked.

One of the dependencies, pycairo, required it. I did not compile it at the beginning and therefore some of the dependencies were compiled against different versions of python - maybe this could have been responsible for the error.

I have started again using an older version of pycairo and the included python 2.5 - hopefully it will work this time!

[pcampbell87]

I've done it!

gcompris.sfs

I decided on .sfs files as it makes the installation quick and simple. This file contains the main program and all the dependencies and comes in around 55.5 mb. There is a second .sfs which includes the extra languages and voices which I am currently uploading (another 50 mb file) - I will post a link once it has finished.

I have given Gcompris a quick test and everything seems to work ok, however as I have never used the program before I am not the best person to tell whether any features are missing. If you notice anything that isn't working it is probably just a missing dependency and if you let me know I will happily recompile it.

Enjoy

[pcampbell87]

Extra languages and voices.

gcompris-languages.sfs

[ttuuxxx]

excellent glad you managed to do it
great job
ttuuxxx