LearningForward

Kent Chesnut's technology in education blog.

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.