Playing w/ Activity packs in build 702

[Bryan Berry]

Hey guys, 

Today I tested out almost of all of the activities on
wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities on build 702. 

I remember reading an e-mail from Kim Quirk asking folks to test
installing the activities on build 702. I am posting my findings here in
case it might be useful. You may already be aware of the problems I
encountered. 

First I downloaded all of the activities from the wiki page. I didn't
use any automated scripts or xo-get because bandwidth is quite poor at
my location. I didn't test out activity sharing, hopefully will do that
tomorrow or Friday.

What didn't work:
OurStories v.1-beta
Mimic v.1
MaMaMedia Storybuilder v.12  :( really an awesome activity
Tuxpaint v.1 --> doesn't run at all
Schoolsplay v.0.4- runs but display screwed up, hard to read
MaMaMedia Creative Center v.3 - works but doesn't do __anything__,
appears
to be an advertisement
Kuku - doesn't run
Inferno - doesn't run
Dr. Geo II - v.104 does run but really, really slowly
Watch & Listen v.10 doesn't even show an icon in the activity panel


What Works:
Scratch 
Need Words app to work w/ Nepali, otherwise mostly useless
Newsreader runs but very slowly
Maze
Speak
Browse
Write
Paint, OK
Measure
EToys 
Memorize
StarChart
Moon
SimCity starts up, didn't play w/ it much
Record
TurtleArt
SocialCalc
Ruler
PlayGo
PollBuilder runs, but Lesson Plans don't render properly, appears to
be xml-1.0, UTF-8
MaMaMedia Learning Center
Jokebook
Jump
Jigsaw Puzzle
XoIRC
Implode
Frotz
XaOS
Flipsticks

Other issues:
In general, Etoys-based activities start pretty quickly but take a
long time to shutdown, literally 2 minutes. This is an issue our team
in Nepal is wrestling w/. Hopefully we will come up w/ a solution that
can be shared. I should ask Hilaire for help w/ this.

Minimal documentation for Starchart, Go, Measure, Jump, Implode,
Connect. These are __great__ activities but it would be hard for a kid
to get into them w/out having background knowledge. Our two schools will
share a 128 kbps Internet connection so it will be harder for the kids
to google for answers.

SocialCalc, appears to be proprietary. The license info read "All Rights
Reserved." How are we allowed to use it
and how can we translate it? Am I missing something?


I got some weird errors during bootup  HAL daemon userdel: user 1035
does not exist

I got 6 or 7 such messages

Question:
How do I install the locale for Gcompris?
How do I install the TamTam suite?


Hope this was of some use. On the whole, I was quite impressed by the
breadth of activities. For now, 702 gets my vote for Update.1 stable
release


-- 
Bryan W. Berry
Systems Engineer
OLE Nepal, http://www.olenepal.org