My Ubuntu Blog

Educational Games For Young Children

I have a 4 year old niece, Minahil. She has an interest in my computer. Her parents don’t own a computer at home, so whenever she is visiting us with her mom, she likes to sit with me when I am working and ask me questions. I am not an education expert and don’t know how to teach basic computing skills to young children. So I am trying it on my own by allowing her to learn on the basis of her likes and dislikes, easyness and difficulty level and other things. She can differentiate betweeen Xubuntu, XP and Ubuntu and she thinks that Ubuntu is the coolest “System”. She can find Alphabates on the keyboard and type slowly, She also likes to use TuxPaint but finds it difficult to control the mouse. I can not understand how to teach her about the mouse. May be the mouse we have is too big for her little hands? Or may be children of her age can not learn how to keep their eyes on the screen and move the pointer? I hope we will soon get over it.

I downloaded her Klettres but she lost interest in it very soon. She has already mastered the alphabate. Now I needed something that teaches how to group things, identify things, introduces to the concepts of sizes, shapes, measurements, numbers, addition and substraction.

Childsplay in Ubuntu Dapper’s repository came with only two games. One is a Memory Card game and the other is a letter game. Minahil played and enjoyed them both but they were too childish for her. She learnt them quickly but the sounds and graphics kept her interested. I realized that children like to repeat things alot.

I checked out Childsplay’s original website, and found that there are several other games available. But it didn’t explain how to add other games. The link to the documentation page didn’t work. I figured out that may be these other games are available as plugins and checked out the project’s sourceforge files. I downloaded plugin files but later found that Ubuntu has Chilsplay installed on a different path. Now I opened synaptic and found that the same plugins package is also available in synaptic. Downloaded it again, this time with synaptic. It taught me once again that I should first look for packages in Synaptic.

So now we have some more games to play with, I haven’t played them with Minahil yet but I am sure that she is going to love them all. There are games that are not for Minahil’s age and skills and I am still looking for ways to teach my little fairy how to use computer as a learning tool. If anyone of you knows about some good online resource on this topic, please let me know.
Tags: Education, Children.

Posted in Free Software, Games, Ubuntu | 7 Comments »

Ubuntu for Bad Guys

I am Muslim and we don’t really celebrate Christmas here in Pakistan. So Satanic or Christian doesn’t matter to me. But since downloading the Satanic Edition was easier I decided to give it a try, besides I was already feeling like downloading some new wallpapers for a change and this Satanic Edition is nothing more than a bundle of hot evil graphics.

It looks great and the idea of having something Evil on our desktops is nothing new, people had been downloading strippers to their desktops for ages so why not the Satan himself?

Posted in Edgy, Linux, Ubuntu | 1 Comment »

IRC Clients for Ubuntu

I personally feel that mIRC is the best IRC client ever. Unfortunately, mIRC is not available for Linux. I tried IRC clients available for Ubuntu to find out something closest to or better than mIRC.

Xchat IRC client
It is easy to use but it is missing certain features that most mIRC users would find necessary. For example when you double click on a nick in a chatroom it displays whois info in the status tab instead of opening a query or private chat window. You can change this behavior in settings by replacing “QUOTE WHOIS %s %s” with “QUERY %s%s”. When you select some text in a chat window and right click it does not you show you an option to copy the selected text. You will have to use your keyboard shortcut CTRL+C to copy. In the input textarea, right click shows an option to paste. There are lots of other options in settings that you can change to make xchat act a lot like mIRC.

Xchat Gnome
There is Xchat Gnome the default IRC client for Ubuntu. Since Dapper it doesn’t get installed by default you will have to install it yourself. This IRC client is the gnome interface for X-chat popular IRC client. What I personally don’t like about it is that it doesn’t have tabs. Windows are listed in a sidebar tree. It has plugins support but I personally found Xchat IRC’s settings a lot better than this Gnome client.

Gaim
You can chat on IRC using Gaim but the problem wit Gaim is that it treats IRC the same way it treats Yahoo! or MSN chat. People coming from mIRC wouldn’t find it easy and comfortable. For example Nicknames in the chat window (not the user list) are not clickable. So if someone says something on the main of a chatroom and you want to Private Message them then you will have to either type the command or find their Nick in the userlist and then double click it.

I also tried LostIRC, a dead simple irc client but it lacks some really basic interface features, BitchX was too advance for me. I haven’t tried Chatzilla because it was a 10 MB download. I also didn’t try any IRC client for KDE but previously when I was testing Kubuntu, I tried Konversation and loved it. Right now I am using Xchat IRC client and would love to hear if there is something better than that.

Posted in Information Society, Networking, Ubuntu | 9 Comments »

Deleting Unwanted Files

Recently I realized that the Disks utility was showing 8.6 GiB consumed on my Ubuntu partition (I have Xubuntu installed on another partition and have one FAT partition). I decided to free up some disk space by deleting temporary files. I found that there is no tool in Dapper to automate this process. There is a tool for KDE called ‘Kleansweep‘ and also there is a feature specification on launchpad to integrate a similar tool in Ubuntu. But right now Dapper users should do it manually relying on Google and their own instincts to decide what is safe to delete and what could break their system’s stability.

To free up disk space we need to delete unnecessary files. But where are these files and how do I know that it is safe to delete them? I have found that it is safe to delete files in /home/username/.thumbnails/normal and /home/username/.thumbnails/fail folder.

It is also safe to delete the downloaded packages in /var/cache/apt/archives I personally don’t like to delete these files. Infact I even copy and paste these files to a separate partition on my hard disk. Why? Because these files are the downloaded packages we install using apt (apt-get or synaptic). If we uninstall a package and then later decide to reinstall it we will have to download it again which consumes time and bandwidth. But if you are not like one of those people who install and uninstall software on a daily basis without need or reason then it is safe to delete these files.

You can also free up disk space by emptying browser cache, saved chat files, old log files, etc.

Have we cleaned all unnecessary files? I don’t think so. I really think that there should be an easy to use application to do this job.

Posted in Dapper, Gnome, KDE, Linux, Tips, Ubuntu | No Comments »

Troubleshoot Ubuntu Edgy Upgrade

I haven’t upgraded to Edgy yet. I really want to but I am afraid to loose the stability, usefulness and the charm of Dapper that comes with Long Term Support. I was looking around to see what kind of trouble people facing while upgrading to Edgy from Dapper. To my surprise, there is a whole lot of users out there who had bad experiences while upgrading to Edgy. Looking at these complains on Ubuntu forums, Slashdot and blogosphere, I decided to compile a list of links that might offer some help to those who want to troubleshoot their Upgrade Disaster.

Debian Admin has a wonderful article about Ubuntu Edgy upgrade problems and their solutions. If your issue is not listed there then you can add it in comments or move on to the Ubuntu forums.

In the sub-forum Installation and Upgrades, you will find plenty of solutions. It is good to search the forum and the best way to do it is to search for the error you recieve during your upgrade failure by typing the error in the search box. While browsing the forum, I found quite interesting bits about Edgy upgrade issues in the First sticky thread of the sub-forum, titled “PLEASE use the official upgrade method! (if you decide to upgrade)“. Like I found that the first recommended method described on EdgyUpgrades wiki page does not work for Xubuntu. After further more research I found people who upgraded from Clean 6.06 to 6.10 without using any third party tools and causing any harm to their Ubuntu System’s health and still they faced trouble.

Posted in Dapper, Edgy, Linux, Tips, Ubuntu | 3 Comments »

Not a Healthy Ubuntu System

Dennis talked about the issue of unhealthy Ubuntu systems and how they interrupt between distribution upgrades. Dennis presents a list of signs to identify a possibly unhealthy system. He writes:

What makes an Ubuntu system unhealthy, you’d say - well here are a few examples:

• Automatix/easyubuntu/fasterdapper
• Third party packages
• checkinstall’ed or alien’ed packages

The problem is that many people think that Automatix, EasyUbuntu, fasterdapper, and other such tools are the easiest and quick ways to configure their systems for multimedia and everything else. Since these tools are mentioned throughout Ubuntu forums and has their Wiki pages in Community Documentation, newbies usually assume that it is safe to use them and they can undo these actions just as easily as they perform them. Looking at the Ubuntu forum’s edgy upgrade troubleshooting thread, it seems untrue.

It makes users like me wonder, how we might go about customizing our Ubuntu system in a safe and healthy manner. We need a solution which does not create problems with future upgrades and could easily be undone if needed. Some ways to resolve this issue were suggested in the discussion on Dennis’ post. These include a Ubuntu Health Checker, warnings on using scripts such as those mentioned above and providing properly integrated Ubuntu alternates to these tools. I particularly found Joey Stanford’s Distribution Upgrade technique more useful, but it needs a fast working Internet connection.

Posted in Dapper, Edgy, Tips, Ubuntu | 2 Comments »

Make Changes to Grub Boot Loader

People often ask about how they can make changes to their Grub boot loader menu. This is one of the most commonly asked question that comes from newbies who have a dual/multi boot Ubuntu with some other operating system(s) like Windows, Kubuntu,Xubuntu or some other Linux distro installed. Open Source software are about Freedom, so basically all open source software are easy to modify. In most cases the settings are saved somewhere in a text file and all you need to do is to open it up and modify these settings.

1. Open Nautilus with root privileges by typing this:
gksudo nautilus
2. Now go to /boot/grub/
3. Open the file menu.lst in Text Editor of your choice.

This is where you can make changes to your Grub menu. You can change the timeout before Grub automatically loads the default operating system. You can also change the default operating system to boot.

Suppose if you have Ubuntu and then you install Kubuntu to a different partition on your hard disk. The later installed OS Kubuntu would either ask you to install or not to install Grub boot loader or simply install the Grub. Now if you want to make changes to your Grub menu then you will make these changes in Kubuntu, you will have a menu.lst file in your Ubuntu installation but its not functioning anymore.

Ubuntu Documentation also has a page about how to change default operating system.

Posted in GNU, Tips, Ubuntu | No Comments »