Rewriting for Linux?

[Don Hopkins]

Mitch Bradley wrote:
> Our system is loosely based on Fedora Core 6.  The core graphics 
> toolkit is called Cairo.  Information about it may be found at 
> http://www.cairographics.org .  Cairo just handles the graphical 
> output.  For input and windowing, we use the GTK+ toolkit, see 
> http://www.gtk.org .
>
> Happy Coding,
> Mitch Bradley
>
Hey Mitch, is there a version of your Forth that runs under Linux, or do 
I have to type L1-A (or whatever it is on the OLPC) and halt the 
operating system to get at the Forth interpreter?  I miss the old 
Forthmacs that I used to run under SunOS on the SPARC.

Martin, are you porting the Mid-Summer Night's Dream Illumination eBook 
you described on your web page? That's interesting because I'm working 
on an eBook reader that supports PDF, which is good for text as well as 
illustrations, and is programmable in Python. You will be able to render 
PDF on the screen using the Cairo graphics library from Python programs. 
So you could convert the text and graphics to PDF, and write a Python 
program to display it and interact with the user. (The eBook reader will 
let you read any PDF document of course, but it will be nice to add some 
interactive "special sauce" to make it more interesting that a paper book).

I'd love to see some kind of collaborative eBook sharing activity that 
lets kids synchronize the pages of their eBooks over the wireless 
network, with a bouncing ball or highlighting that prompts kids to read 
lines of a play out loud, each kid playing a different character. A 
Mid-Summer Night's Dream would be excellent material for that kind of 
shared activity.

    -Don