When it comes to the little ones at home, there are really few applications and / or distributions on Linux. Generally of the software projects for children that I have seen that have had an excellent response are those that include a Raspberry or a mini pocket computer.
En this time we will talk about excellent software that we can use for our children at home, the application that we will talk about today is called GCompris.
GCompris is an educational computer program with different activities for children between 2 and 10 years of age.
Some activities are like video games, but always educational. Among others, it allows you to learn and practice calculations and text, as well as to start using a computer.
GCompris is multiplatform so it can be used on Linux, Windows, Mac OS, Android and iOS (iPad).
GCompris It has different activities that the locals can do, of which are divided into categories.
These can be found in the following way:
- Discovering the computer: keyboard, mouse, touch screen, etc.
- Reading: letters, words, reading practice, writing text, etc.
- Arithmetic: numbers, operations, memory in tables, enumeration, double-entry table, etc.
- Science: canal lock, the water cycle, renewable energy, etc.
- Geography: countries, regions, culture, etc.
- Games: chess, memory, line up 4, hangman game, tic-tac-toe, among others
- Others: colors, shapes, Braille alphabet, learning to tell time and more.
Today, GCompris offers more than 100 activities and more are in development. GCompris is free software, so you have the possibility to adapt it to your needs, to improve it and, most importantly, to share it with children around the world.
About version 0.95
Currently the application It is in its version 0.95 with which they added the support to Mac again.
This new version contains 7 new activities:
- Binary bulbs: to learn to count in binary.
- Railway activity: train visual memory.
- Solar System: to know our solar system.
- Name that Note: to learn to recognize musical notes and their names.
- Play the piano: to train to read notes on a sheet music.
- Play Rhythm: train following a musical rhythm.
- Piano composition: to learn the composition of a musical score.
Also developers They already broke the news that they will provide a package for those who are users of a Raspberry Pi.
While, On Linux and Windows, previously there were two separate installers for OpenGL and software rendering.
Now both rendering modes are available from the same installer. By default, OpenGL rendering is used and if it doesn't work, an error will be displayed and it will switch to software rendering.
Since this change is new, the developers inform us that in case it is not the case, the software rendering mode can be manually selected by editing the configuration file in the path:
~/.config/gcompris-qt/gcompris-qt.conf
Here we just have to find the line
renderer=auto
And replace auto with software and save the file.
How to install the GCompris educational suite on Ubuntu and derivatives
For those who are interested in being able to install this suite on their systems, they can do so by following the instructions that we share with you below.
The installation can be done in our system with the help of Flatpak packages, so we must have the support to install applications of this type.
To install, we are going to open a terminal in the system with Ctrl + Alt + T and in it we are going to execute the following command:
flatpak install --user https://flathub.org/repo/appstream/org.kde.gcompris.flatpakref
Later If we want to update or check if there is an update and install it, we just have to type the following command:
flatpak --user update org.kde.gcompris
And ready with it, we will have installed this suite in our system. To run it, just look for the launcher in our application menu to start using it.
In case of not finding the launcher, we can execute the suite in our system from the terminal, we just have to execute the following command:
flatpak run org.kde.gcompris
Thanks for sharing this information.