[Hamara-devel] Should hamara be an educational distribution or an edutainment distribution ?

[Vikas Tara]

>>
>>> Thanks for the minetest pointer - I hadn't seen that before and my kids
>>> are minecraft addicts. They will be apt-getting it this evening :)
>>
>> Were your kids able to play with minetest ? How was the experience for
>> you while installing and configuring it and how was their experience of
>> the game.
Yes they we're. The install was much easier than minecraft - one command.

The kids got on well with it - I asked them to compare it to minecraft. 
Their main feedback was that it didn't have
as many blocks. They loved the fact it was free though!

I have told them there are additiona packages - so I expect some more 
feedback from them pretty soon.
>>
>>> I was thinking of a wiki section and blog posts around gaming - so
>>> perhaps a few of us can devote some time to that?
>>
>> This actually is a huge topic as games in Debian is huge but sadly an
>> underlooked topic and blend. There are lot of 80's and 90's arcade games
>> which have been ported over to FOSS and then to Debian. There is still
>> huge quantity of such games which need love and porting over to newer
>> toolkits and ways of playing games. I know of few DD's who took the
>> games already ported, bought the old arcade machines for a song, took
>> out all the old electronics and put an embedded SBC (raspberry pi,
>> beagleblone etc.), used whatever shields they had to use to map those
>> old controller buttons to the SBC and sell it back for a profit + AMC to
>> various retro gaming places, senior homes and other places.
>
> Just to make sure that I'm not talking out of my ass did a small 
> search for just few days and while there was a barrage of answers, you 
> can see one which sits right in the UK.
>
> See https://vimeo.com/126526700 as an e.g.
>
>> I would need to dig deep in my mailbox but it's possible I could fish
>> out those blog posts and those people who did that.
>>
>> While the above doesn't make big bucks, the same can't be said about
>> hacked/modified Xbox's , Playstations and you name it gaming thing. All
>> have been more or less successfully penetrated with pretty good chances
>> of loading Debian + games on these machines. I say chances as I haven't
>> kept up-to-date on those efforts. The last I heard was, that even the
>> PS4 had its defences broken and we were able to load Debian on it.
>>
>> In either ways, what I am saying is that there's whole lot of hardware +
>> games play that we could play if we wanted to do. Just would need bit of
>> in-house expertise on the various knobs of the various kind of hardware
>> and what is required to map it.
>>
>> As far as blog posts and wiki about gaming is concerned, would gladly
>> contribute to it. For instance gcompris itself has around 150 games (or
>> activities as it's only developer says) so just documenting them would
>> be a task. Could be one blog post for documenting at the most 2
>> activities. This would be besides having a blog post which gives some
>> simple ways to change some of the variables in the game. In some games
>> there might be a .conf which will help us to do that, others might not
>> in which case talk to the developer concerned. The mind is simply
>> bubbling with lot of possibilities, only a fraction of which I have
>> shared above.
>>
Perhaps we should start with blog posting / wiki pages devoted to games 
that are already available in the hamara distro?

Of course we should ensure they are available in the upcoming debianised 
version too.

Minetest is a good place to start as lots of users might want that.

On another note, I did manage my first blog post!
https://blogs.hamaralinux.org/2015/05/xbmc-kodi-on-hamara-linux/

-- 
Founder - Hamara Linux
www.hamaralinux.org
www.twitter.com/hamaralinux