[DE | EN | FR | JA | ES | KO | PT]

Welcome to another issue of Georg's Brave GNU World.

Debian Jr.

The current focus of development is the age-group up to 8 years in order to approach the group up to 12 years with the next step. First of all the target audience are parents, teachers, older friends and relatives that are using Debian already and wish to share it with the kids in their lives. Strictly speaking this gives the Debian Jr. project two target audiences. The aforementioned group will be setting up and administrating the systems, so making the installation of kid-suited packets and prepared setups as easy as possible is the goal here. This will be done the Debian way by creating task packages for the different tasks that will have dependencies to the packages this task requires.

The second target audience are the kids, of course. For them it is important that programs are easy to use and tailored to their needs - also using the programs needs to be fun as this is an important motivational factor. But there is a second aspect that is to be considered when modifying a system for children. As Ben Armstrong said: if there is any way to break a system, a kid will find it very, very quickly. His own daughter almost drove him nuts by changing her password on a daily basis and promptly forgetting the password the next day. And then there was the day when she decided to load every file she could get hold of - including MP3-files, tar archives, the kernel and /dev/dsp - into the buffer of her pico editor. For this reason a certain attention should be diverted into "kidproofing" the system. Steps like the liberal application of ulimits and quotas as well as limiting access to some tools and functions seem to be a very good idea.

It is only a rumor that some system administrators already dream about using the experience for setting up workstations in their companies.

According to Ben Armstrong Debian has been chosen as the basis for this project because of its strong Free Software philosophy. It is an open system that has seen a lot of users become maintainers expanding and improving the system. To him this seems like the perfect basis on which to introduce children to computers.

One of the biggest strengths of the system, being maintained by a lot of volunteers, is also one of its greatest weaknesses as coordination of the participants is sometimes problematic. Of course Ben cannot do such a project without help - but unfortunately the number of volunteers is much too big to be mentioning everyone here (at the moment there are about 160 subscribers on the mailing list). But there is still a lot to be done and help is always welcome. Especially porting the packages to other languages seems like a good idea since a lot of children do not have English as their native language.

Additionally the project is currently looking for a suitable logo and it is planned to create special themes to give people the chance to identify a system as "Debian Jr."

Personally I consider this project to be very important since it introduces children to computers very early and at the same time shows them how systems can be built upon the spirit of freedom. This is a very good first experience with technologies and information.

That said I'll come to two projects of general interest.

GTKtalog

Of course this is already very good as far as creating a catalog of your favority MP3-CDs goes, but GTKtalog has an additional feature that makes it even more useful. It supports virtual filesystems like tgz or rpm, so files within these archives can be found without a problem.

One of the post pressing problems according to Yves is the lack of documentation and the nonexistance of German and Italian versions of the menus. For several other languages the internationalization is already complete. His other plans are to improve functionality - some parts contain solutions that he would not call "bugs" but they could be solved in a more user-friendly and elegant way. One of the things emphasized by Yves was that he would prefer help from the outside for doing the documentation. His reasoning behind that is that he would automatically write it from an author's point of view which is not necessarily the most useful perspective for the reader of the documentation.

For further development there is a rather voluminous TODO file that the author wants to work his way through. But despite its being under development, GTKtalog is definitely already usable and has found its way on the Mandrake distribution.

On top of these things Yves Mettier wanted to point out that one of the best sides about developing for him are the emails he gets. Sometimes it is a little like Christmas when people send him another translation or a pretty big patch.

Of course GTKtalog is released under the GNU General Public License.

Jam

Especially interestuing is the possibility to import and export CD lists as XML files. Since the database possesses an "owner" field, a user can import the lists of a friend and can so browse his music collection as well.

Jam has been written by Fabian Mörchen and Thomas Schwarzpaul under the GNU General Public License. Unfortunately there is still a drawback to it as Jam uses some proprietary (although gratis) libraries. This pretty much raises the same complex of problems that KDE had - so as a perspective it would probably be better to replace the proprietary components with Free Software or work on making them Free.

The problematic area at the moment is the installation, the authors say. It doesn't work automatically on some systems although installation by hand is relatively easy. Jam is completely console- & command-line-driven, so a GUI is on top of the list of tasks to be done. Furthermore the authors would like to create output backends for HTML and TeX.

As far as the core functionality is concerned, it is planned to have Jam administrate play lists and to use these to create CDs or tapes. Additionally they would like to interface with a MP3 player and encoder as well as supporting the creation of CD covers. But there is still a lot to be done to reach that point and help is explicitly welcome.

The background of this project is a work the authors had to create for their university. Once they were done they liked it so much that they released it as Free Software - these roots pose the advantage that the source code has a clean structure and should be relatively understandable for beginners, too.

GNU Font Editor

Since the programs in this area were mostly command line driven or based upon non-Free toolkits like Motif, Anuradha saw need in this area. He plans to use existing solutions like the GNU Fontutils for orientation, though.

Currently GFE only supports BDF fonts, so the next important steps are the support of PCF(X) fonts and afterwards PS fonts. Later he also wants to approach TTF and other formats. He expects problems once the support of vector based fonts is to be included as the mixed representation has not yet been completely thought through.

As soon as GFE is ready, it will become an extaordinarily useful tool as it allows converting all kinds of fonts into each other and it will fit in with the GNOME/GTK GUI very well.

But to that point there is still a lot of work to be done and one of the things most needed by Anuradha is more people on the mailing list for stronger peer review in order to make the development process faster.

GNU Typist

Typist is a program to train the correct and efficient typing. It does support different keyboard layouts and is internationalized with NLS. So far it has reportedly been used on x86-GNU/Linux, x86-WinNT, x86-DOS, Aix and Sparc/SunOS - so it is rather portable.

The program itself follows the concept of an interpreter for lesson files that can be expanded indefinitely. As the program is already relatively complete, the creation of these files for more languages and keyboard layouts is the major task at hand.

Although the next project may not have immediate importance to most people, but it could be of extreme interest to people having a shopping site on the internet.

ISoSy

The advantages are stability, easy customization and it has a logical separation between general design, content and source code. The project supports multiple languages and currencies but is capable of saving all customer information in a single database. This makes it possible to have a single page or ordering interface for all customers.

The project is already usable and especially small and medium sized companies can use it to improve the contact to their customers. The HTML design used has been done by Robert Ükoetter aka Athelas, by the way.

Stefan's plans for future developments are increasing ease of customization and moving some options from the source code into configuration files and automatisms like autmatic switching of currency upon selecting a different language.

The long-term plans contain a GTK/C++ based program for initializing and managing the database as well as automatic FTP transfer to the server. So there are still some things to be done. For this he seeks contact to PHP hackers as well as people with C and GTK+ experience.

As the author would like to emphasize, the special value of this project is in offering a way to make money with Free Software without compromising the ideals and philosophy of the Free Software community.

MDK

The MDK contains a MIXAL Assembler Interface and the already mentioned MIX Virtual Machine with a command line interface. Other than the Mixal project [14], MDK does offer debugging capabilities and supports block devices, though. MDK also contains a rather complete documentation.

Only drawback according to Jose is that MDK does not contain a GUI a the moment. So developing a ncurses and/or GTK+/GNOME front end is the next step. Afterwards he plans to suport MMIX, the RISC-based version of MIX planned by Donald Knuth.

enough for now