Seeking help for learning system for absolute beginners

Maciej Katafiasz wrote:
>
> Again, I heartily recommend Ubuntu. It's close to being as easy to
> install as it gets. Administration is fairly easy as well.
>

I'd also throw in another plug for DSL (damn small linux).  Runs fine on
a 32MB pentium.  Comes complete with GUI and office suite.  Desktop
looks a lot like the os-that-must-not=be-named.  With 256MB, you should
also have no problem with Ubuntu.

On Sun, 27 Jan 2008 14:54:25 +0000 (UTC), Maciej Katafiasz <mathrick@gmail.c
om>
tried to confuse everyone with this message:

>Den Sun, 27 Jan 2008 04:42:40 -0800 skrev pg:
> 
>
>Please don't. It's the worst possible OS to install for such a scenario.
>It'll be unmaintainable for you, and (what's even worse) will teach the
>kids that computers are inherently unreliable and not to be trusted.

What a bunch of FUD. Win98 is easily the best OS Microsoft has ever created.
 Too
bad they don't support it anymore.

--
|Don't believe this - you're not worthless              ,gr---------.ru
|It's us against millions and we can't take them all... |  ue     il   |
|But we can take them on!                               |     @ma      |
|                       (A Wilhelm Scream - The Rip)    |______________|

pg wrote:
> The computers will be Windows 98SE based, with Pentium III or better
> CPU, 256MB of RAM each. Graphic is VGA, mostly S3-powered graphic
> cards.

Pentium III are already pretty fast.
I have developed a few years on an Pentium II 300MHz,
before I got my Pentium IV.
I had 192 MB, and WinXP ran quite well on it.
At the time I had used it,
I had absolutely no experience with Linux,
and I feared it's complexity.
But that's long over.
Now I'm using several Linuxes, and especially Kubuntu is great & easy.

> I am thinking of installing Logo for them, but before I do that, I do
> need to ask the Gurus here for help.

I have compiled aUCBLogo for Kubuntu-6.06 and 7.04.
Here are the packages:
<http://www.physik.uni-augsburg.de/~micheler/Logo.html>

You can also try
<[url]http://www.physik.uni-augsburg.de/~micheler/aucblogo-4.8-windows98-debug.zip[/url
]>
but Win98 itself is very unstable,
as well as the Debug version of aUCBLogo-4.8.

I'm developing aUCBLogo already for several years,
and aUCBLogo-4.7 is quite nice
and can produce high quality 3D animations.

> Before I continue, some background. I'm from Malaysia, a third world
> country, and the children that our computers are for are from poverty
> stricken families. The computers will be placed in a "after school
> hang out place" operated by a Catholic Charity organization. The
> children can understand the Chinese language but not very familiar
> with the English language.

aUCBLogo-4.7 is localizable, but still only ASCII.
aUCBLogo-4.8 can be compiled in Unicode mode,
and the primitives are in parts already translated into Chinese,
as is the user interface.

> Okay, now .. which flavor of Logo do you think best suit the children,
> as well as the computers? Or if you know of any offering from Lisp and/
> or Dylan that suit this task, kindly please share.

On Windows 98 you may also run FMSLogo or Elica, I guess.
But Linux is so much nicer than Win98,
so I really recommend Kubuntu and aUCBLogo or XLogo.
XLogo is also translated into several Languages,
but I guess they use Java, so it might not be as memory efficient.
aUCBLogo-4.7 is a pure interpreter,
so it's not really fast,
but I'm working on a "compile" function in aUCBLogo-4.8,
which already can compile simple procedures,
that use only global variables.

> The computers are all donated stuffs, so they are not really fast, nor
> powerful. With 256MB of RAM each, I doubt they can run any fancy
> programs.

If harddisc space is the problem, you may try Knoppix Linux:
it even does not need a harddisc.

Cheers,
Andreas

On Jan 27, 4:13 pm, pg <pen...@catholic.org> wrote:
> On Jan 27, 6:54 am, Maciej Katafiasz <mathr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>
> Thanks for replying.
>
> There are several problems that we are facing here:
>
> A) Everything we have are donated stuffs. All the computers are
> donated, actually, they are computers that people throw away. We got
> them for free, fix them up as well as we could, and we can only find
> 256MB of RAM for each of them.
256MB is good amount of RAM If you don't plan to play games, image or
video processing or something like that. I bought my P4 in 2002 with
256 MB and upgraded year ago to 768MB
>
> B) Due to the limited RAM, we can't run any other OS than Win98SE or
> WinME.
I run XP with 256 RA for 5 years
> Plus, we do not want to infringe on any copyright issue. We got
> a pile of old Win98SE genuine MS CDs, so we kinda like like have no
> other choice but to use Win98SE.
If you have at least one internet connection try ubuntu it's very easy
to use and all of the software needed is free as well. It's a very
polished distro. If you can't have an internet connection maybe it's
better to stick with 98, linux needs little tweaking now and then to
become *usable*. Most of it's applications are rather spartan but they
usually do the job.
>
> C) This entire operation runs on a very very tight budget. These are
> the children that people don't care about. They all come from poverty
> stricken families, and they are at the edge of becoming street kids.
> What we do there is to keep them in school, provide them with some
> incentives to keep learning, keep exploring, etc.
Noble mission.
>
> D) We do not have any license to run Win2000 or WinXP, and we do not
> have the money to buy them either. On the Linux side, so far I am
> still trying to learn Linux, I can set up a system, just a base
> system. Installing packages, on the other hand, is still too much for
> me.
You can learn ubuntu easily, there are great community to help you
almost immediately.
>
> E) As I mention earlier, these are the kids people don't care about,
> therefore, our operation is facing the same fate - people just do not
> care about us, period. No funding, no help, no nada. We all do it out
> of our own time, our own pocket, our own everything. In other words,
> we have absolutely NO leeway to get fancy stuffs. That is why I'm
> looking for freeware, abandonedware, and/or open-sourced softwares to
> get the whole thing going.
There's a pile of programs that fitas your needs. If you want to teach
them common lisp, there is many free implementations both commercial
and opensource
>
> Yes, it's like a chop-chop thing, nothing fancy. But we are doing it.
> That is why I need the help from all the Gurus here. Please share with
> us any of your suggestion, opinion, point, tip, etc. I thank you for
> it.
If you plan to run on almost no budget and have at least one live
connection go for linux, most of the software over there is free. In
the windows world there's a lot of shareware or limited versions but
people still expect to pay most of the time.
> 
>
> See, even OLPC is a luxury for us. Do you know what USD100 can buy
> here? Remember that this is a third world country, and our conversion
> rate is 3.3 to 1. USD100 is 330 of our local currency here, and this
> can buy A LOT OF STUFFS !
>
> In fact, if I purchase 2 OLPC for USD100 each, the USD200 can get me a
> NEW PC with Intel Duo-Core CPU, and 1GB of DDR2 RAM and a 120GB SATA
> hard disk. Of course, it doesn't have any software, nor any OS.
>
> And in our situation, all our PC are FREE - yeah, NO CHARGE. Yes, they
> are OLD PCs, Pentium III, ranges from 500MHz to 900MHz. But they do
> run, and that's the important thing here.
500MHz to 900MHz CPUs are good processors, unles you plan to play
games or image/video processing they will do just fine
> 
>
> I'll check with the Scheme people, thank you very much for sharing the
> info (and thanks to Rainer as well!). My initial pick was Logo because
> it was made with the original intention of giving kids a start in
> programming, at least, conceptually. Perhaps you're right, there are
> other things out there, like Scheme. But I'll check with them.
What's wrong with common lisp? It has a large and vital community to
answer your questions when you got stuck
tons of free to download ebooks
http://www-cgi.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cm.../LispBook/index
http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/
http://www.psg.com/~dlamkins/sl/contents.html
http://www.markwatson.com/opencontent/
http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~shapiro/Commonlisp/
http://www.franz.com/resources/educ...cooper.book.pdf
free videos from Franz certification courses:
http://www.franz.com/services/classes/download.lhtml
A lot of high quality implementation both free as in beer or open
source:
(free commercial software)
http://www.franz.com/downloads/allegrodownload.lhtml
http://www.lispworks.com/downloads/index.html
http://www.cormanlisp.com/download.html
opensource
http://www.gigamonkeys.com/lispbox/#download
http://sbcl.sourceforge.net/platform-table.html
http://clisp.cons.org/
http://ecls.sourceforge.net/
Not to mention  countless tutorials & open source libraries.

>
> Thanks again for everything.
>
> Hope that other Gurus here, if you have anything to share, please do
> so.
I'm far from guru, but good luck with your program.

cheers
Slobodan

In article <fnj5f7$2qf$1@registered.motzarella.org>, plinnane3
@yahoo.com.invalid says...
> krw wrote: 
>
> depends on your POV; win98se does have alot of supporters.  I (continue
> to) use XP because it hasn't crashed since I installed it; if it wasn't
> for that I'd probably still be using win98se or winme; *much* lighter,
> more user-comprehensible, full command line; get infected and just
> reinstall in a couple minutes.

All Win9x variants are a pile of shite.  I've been having a lot of
trouble with XP lately too.  In the five or six years I used Win2K I
never had any problems that I could pin on M$.  Win2K was by far the
most stable Windows.  (let's just forget Vista ever happened)

--
Keith

Timofei Shatrov wrote:
> On Sun, 27 Jan 2008 14:54:25 +0000 (UTC), Maciej Katafiasz <mathrick@gmail
.com>
> tried to confuse everyone with this message:
> 
>
> What a bunch of FUD. Win98 is easily the best OS Microsoft has ever create
d. Too
> bad they don't support it anymore.
>
Yeah, almost as good as Win/98SE with the 64K GDI limit and still not
too much more advanced than Win/95b with TCP/IP 1.2 other than some USB
support.   Not even in the same ballpark stability wise as the NT
kernels.  Somewhat difficult to run even 98SE for long periods of time
without a reboot to clear the GDI leaks and memory cruft.  NT variants
can run for ws or longer without going unstable.

On Jan 27, 8:55 am, Waldek Hebisch <hebi...@math.uni.wroc.pl> wrote:
> In comp.lang.lisp pg <pen...@catholic.org> wrote:
>
>
> 
> 
> 
> 
>
> You may consider Poplog system:
>
> http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/p...oplog.info.html
>
> Poplog gives you four programming languages: Pop11, Common Lisp,
> SML, and Prolog.  Poplog need only a few megabytes of memory and
> will run pretty fast on 500 MHz processor.  Installation takes
> about 70 Mb of disk space.  Pop11 is a language with similar
> power to Common Lisp, but is more similar to traditional languages
> (it uses Pascal like syntax).  For beginners Pop11 offers words
> and list maniputaltions in Logo style, while advanced users can
> use much more.
>
> Let me mention some drawbacks.  First, on Windows Poplog is text-only
> -- Poplog support graphics only on Linux.  Second, Poplog is not
> localised: messages and documantation is in English.  AFAIK the
> program can handle any language, but somebody would have to
> translate texts...
>
> --
>                               Waldek Hebisch
> hebi...@math.uni.wroc.pl

Thanks a lot for the info !

How come the development for Window Poplog had stopped ?

krw wrote:
> In article <fnj5f7$2qf$1@registered.motzarella.org>, plinnane3
> @yahoo.com.invalid says... 
>
> All Win9x variants are a pile of shite.  I've been having a lot of
> trouble with XP lately too.  In the five or six years I used Win2K I
> never had any problems that I could pin on M$.  Win2K was by far the
> most stable Windows.  (let's just forget Vista ever happened)
>
Most trouble with XP is user injected.

In article <R-mdnbnx4NAlqgDanZ2dnUVZ_ovinZ2d@comcast.com>,
lon.stowell@comcast.net says...
> krw wrote: 
> Most trouble with XP is user injected.

In this case, I'm quite sure it's device driver injected.  I have
the damned thing working again (reboot-reinstall) but it still can't
rememberer screen modes across power mode changes worth a damn.
Suspend is useless.

--
Keith

krw wrote:
> In article <R-mdnbnx4NAlqgDanZ2dnUVZ_ovinZ2d@comcast.com>,
> lon.stowell@comcast.net says... 
>
> In this case, I'm quite sure it's device driver injected.  I have
> the damned thing working again (reboot-reinstall) but it still can't
> rememberer screen modes across power mode changes worth a damn.
> Suspend is useless.
>
Ow, I dont remember having that kind of issue even with Win/95a--which
wasnt a model of stability.