Wow! It’s been almost exactly a year 2 years since I posted on my adventures with Scratch on Linux (see post here).
Well, the Scratch team at MIT has made the use of Scratch 1.4 (the latest version) on Ubuntu Linux (versions 9.04 and 9.10) much less of an adventure. I’ve successfully followed the installation procedure on 5 Ubuntu 9.04 computers. I have not done extensive testing on Ubuntu, but everything I’ve tried works fine.
Installer notes:
- The instructions for installing Scratch on Ubuntu are posted here.
- I did NOT use the link https://launchpad.net/+help/soyuz/ppa-sources-list.html (this is a link in the intructions).
- Open the Software Sources panel via System -> Administration -> Software Sources to access the “3rd party software sources” list.
- Although instructed to do so by the instructions, I was not able to “paste” the line
sudo apt-key adv –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com –recv-keys 4EA7974E
into the console. I had to type the line in.
- When you go to the System -> Administration -> Symantec list to find Scratch to select it for install, you’ll find a formidable list to look through. If you look through there and really can’t find Scratch or scratch (I’m sure that happened to me a couple of times), reboot the computer and then look through the list again. Either Scratch miraculously showed up or resting for a couple of minutes while the computer rebooted improved my search capability.
Comparing Scratch on Ubuntu to my original post:
- An installer for Scratch 1.4 is available for Ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10. This alleviates the need to install Squeak and then the WinScratch.zip file… just follow the instructions!
- A launch icon is automatically added to the Applications menu under Programming. No need to open the terminal to start the program.
- Presentation mode works.
- Sound works (although I didn’t explicitly try the midi, so I’m not sure about that).
- The Scratch website works fine with Java installed.
Other notes:
- Edubuntu is no longer published with Ubuntu as part of the same image. First install the standard Ubuntu package, the install the Edubuntu add-on. Link to Ubuntu is here. Link to Edubuntu is here.
Have a great week!
A perfect storm of circumstances has arisen over the last couple of weeks to send me on an investigation of Linux.
- A project came up that might be feasible if a really cheap embedded computer could be found that would run the flash player. A low cost Linux platform might allow the project to be feasible.
- Over the years I’ve considered the perfect kids’ computer platform. I’ve come to believe that Scratch must be a requirement. The OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) computer may be the perfect kids’ platform, if it’ll run Scratch well enough. Until a native Linux version is available, the chatter on the internet is that there are some limitations. I’ve looked at the (current) limitations of Scratch on the Linux platform in conjunction with my Linux investigations above.
- My daughter’s XP computer caught a pretty persistent virus. Cleaning using instructions / utilities I found on the internet seems effective, but the virus keeps coming back. I’m wondering if a Linux platform would be a good fit for most of her needs (if only iTunes was available for Linux).
This post will examine what I found out about Scratch on the Linux platform. I’ll also include other interesting tidbits I learned about Linux along the way. I ran these tests on dell laptops. I looked at 2 Linux builds, Puppy Linux and Edubuntu 7.1.
Puppy Linux
Puppy Linux is a compact Linux build. I learned about it while looking for a really cheap platform (as I mentioned above). In my investigations, I found a $100 PC listed as a Mini Linux PC. Pupply Linux is available as a <100MByte LiveCD that allows you to save your work (and configuration, …) to a USB flash stick. The standard build comes with the SeaMonkey browser with the flash player pre-installed. Whether you can run the browser and flash on the $100 platform is not yet determined, but I did try out Scratch on a laptop running Puppy Linux. Note that you only click desktop icons once in PuppyLinux. I don’t know how many times I ended up with 2 copies of stuff running!
- Scratch runs on top of Squeak. I downloaded the Squeak Virtual Machine for Linux from squeak.org, opened it with the default application, and extracted it to /. I downloaded the standard Image, opened it with the default application, and extracted only the image file (not the Mac version) to /Squeak-3.9-8. I navigated to th e/Squeak-3.9-8 folder and installed by typing “sh INSTALL i686-pc-linux-gnu”. I renamed the Squeak image file (had the revision embedded into the name) to squeak.image in the /Squeak-3.9-8 folder. You can run squeak by navigating to the /Squeak-3.9-8 folder and typing squeak squeak.image. I do get an error about the source files, but that’s all I needed to get Scratch to run on top of Squeak.
- I downloaded the files only PC version of Scratch (WinScratch.zip) from the Scratch website, opened it with the default application, and extracted all the files to /Scratch. (I should have extracted them to / as the Scratch folder was included in the archive). You can run Scratch by navigating to the /Scratch/Scratch folder and typing squeak Scratch.image.
- Scratch works fine, if a little slow. This might be due to a lack of memory since Puppy is running totally out of RAM on the LiveCD. Things that don’t work include:
- MIDI sounds (like drum) don’t work.
- Presentation mode doesn’t work.
- Want Help? button doesn’t do anything.
- Can’t play Scratch projects on the Scratch website as I didn’t work real hard to get Java working.
- I’m sure you can make a launcher to click on and start Scratch from the desktop; I just didn’t bother to figure that out.
Edubuntu
Edubuntu is a full fledged Linux. It’s LiveCD takes a full 700MBytes. It comes with the Mozilla Firefox web browser. The flash player is not pre-installed and is only a little tricky to get installed and working.
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Edubuntu has a cool Add/Remove Programs application that makes adding applications easy. And there are hundreds of applications in the list! Unfortunately, it didn’t work with Squeak. After some browsing, I found links to a rebuild of Squeak that would work with Edubuntu. The virtual machine is available at http://quatur.net/~jens/impara/ubuntu/squeak-vm_3.9.8-6_i386.deb and the image is available at http://quatur.net/~jens/impara/ubuntu/squeakland_3.8-6u_all.deb. Once downloaded, these are installed automatically and Squeak can be executed by selecting Squeakland from the Education tab under Applications.
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Download the WinScratch.zip file from the scratch web site and extract it into /Scratch. You can execute Scratch from the terminal by going to the /Scratch/Scratch folder and typing squeak Scratch.image.
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Create a launcher on the desktop and set its command to /usr/bin/squeak /Scratch/Scratch/Scratch.image. (Yep, I screwed up and got 2 levels of scratch folders on this try, too!) Double-click on the launcher icon to start Scratch.
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Scratch had exactly the same limitations as when it was running on the PuppyLinux platform.
Notes
- Both PuppyLinux and Edubuntu worked with wireless internet connections available on the laptops I used to test.
- PuppyLinux even worked with a Belkin USB-802.11b adaptor on one computer!
- Edubuntu requires more computer horsepower, but… the add / remove programs utility and automatic installations make it a much better platform for normal use (provided, of course, you have the horsepower).
- Edubuntu didn’t properly handle the WideScreen (1280 x 800) on one of the laptops. It displayed at 1024 x 768, yielding a somewhat distorted screen. If I remember correctly, PuppyLinux did the same thing.
Conclusions
- Scratch works sufficiently well on Linux to be a reasonable constructive platform. Assuming it works as well on the OLPC XO laptop, the XO may be the best kids’ platform available. If I understand correctly, the MIT people are planning on making a version of Scratch for the XO, so I suspect the limitations will be eliminated soon.
- Other low cost Linux platforms may also provide good PuppyLinux platforms on which to learn Scratch.