GCompris, Childsplay and Tux Paint tips in Ubuntu

Once you have the proper Ubuntu repository added to get Childsplay (is it Universe?), in order to get sound for GCompris, Childsplay and Tuxpaint, make sure to add the proper packages. For some reason, the sound packages aren’t added as dependencies.

Everything comes together in Debian and OpenBSD, but in Ubuntu, you have to add extra packages to get the sound working in GCompris and Tux Paint. And in Childsplay, if you don’t add an extra package, you won’t get the full slate of games.

These three educational games work every bit as well in Ubuntu as they do in Debian, but you just have to make sure you have all the pieces on your system.

Even though this post is aimed at Ubuntu users, I continue to be amazed at how well these educational packages work in OpenBSD — and how easy it is to install them.

But I’m dedicated to keeping Ubuntu 8.04 running on this laptop for the foreseeable future, so everything our little girl wants to run on this laptop has to run as well as it can.

Ubuntu 8.04 behaving itself quite nicely — all of my issues have been resolved

Now Ubuntu dutifully informs me with the Update Notifier that I have packages that need updating. I’m doing it, my connection is very fast, and I’ll have an up-to-date 8.04 LTS box in the next few minutes.

I added the Childsplay plugins, which gives our daughter the full complement of games on that platform.

And I also added the Gcompris package for English sounds, which will hopefully improve sound in that educational suite.

Both of these things came together more easily in Debian and OpenBSD than they have in Ubuntu, but it wasn’t that hard to add a repository and make sure I installed all the packages I need.

And best of all, something somewhere has solved my USB flash drive problem in Ubuntu 8.04. I now can plug in a flash drive and read and write to it with no problem whatsoever. The only caveat is that the user who plugs in the drive has write privileges, so if a different user wants to write to the flash drive, he/she must be the one who plugs it in, just like in Debian.

And Suspend/Resume has performed admirably tonight. (Can the new Red Hat do as well? I definitely want to find out.)

So I’m at the point where all my current Ubuntu issues have been solved. Sweet!