7.12.2009

TuxType on Puppy 4.2.1

I have been trying to get a fun typing program to teach my nephew how to type on the panasonic toughbook running Puppy4.2.1 that I gave him. I had previously tried an older version of TuxType that was readily installed on DSL using the DSL apps utility and it worked straight away. Nevertheless I wasn't too happy or surprised that this wasn't equally as easy on Puppy4.2.1. I guess I'm still discovering the "paths of least resistance" for configuring my puppy. At one point I found this great review (here) of 3 different typing tutors where the author/father subjected his 13 y.o. to each one and asked him to spend time testing them and then report his observations. In the end, TuxType was found to be fun, but too advanced for teaching from scratch and another app. called Klavaro was the favorite. Well I could only get Klavaro as an i386.deb file and I spent a bunch of time trying to get my puppy to install it and have yet to succeed. From the puppy package manager I found pb-debianinstaller which I had tried out on an earlier puppy and got to work, however, now on Puppy4 there's problems with the web-server configuration....which I know nothing about.

So I finally found a TuxType.pet from this site (http://pupweb.org/desktop/) which I was hyperlinked to off the Puppy Jumping off page stored locally at file://localhost/usr/share/doc/home.htm. However, this newer version is a significant enhancement over the one I used on DSL and required the SDL libraries... so after a bit more searching I found a .pet for those at the almighty puppy forum. Finally I at least have a working program to encourage my nephew to learn....when he's not too busy playing online flash games, building bionicals, pokemon card games...wishful thinking on my part.

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