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

[shirish]

in-line :-

On 05/12/2015 01:38 PM, Vikas Tara wrote:
>
>>>
>>>> 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.

All and any feedback is good. Look forward to seeing more.


>>>> 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?

Hi all,
Would be able to help with that once bug 137 is resolved.

See http://bugs.hamaralinux.org/show_bug.cgi?id=137 , the solution is 
already given, just needs to be implemented.

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

sure.

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

would work on that once the other thing is done.

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

@Vikas - please look at my blog post sitting in drafts at hamara, add 
the bit about debian and see if it's all good or not, once you give the 
go-ahead will do it. It's a bit long though.

-- 
Regards,
Shirish Agarwal,
Community Lead,
Hamaralinux.org