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Re: [school-discuss] Typing Tutors - cross-platform and good?



On Sun, Jul 28, 2002 at 04:07:02AM +0700, David Bucknell wrote:
> Dear Schoolforgers,
> 
> I've been looking at the Free Software typing tutors on Seul/edu's app list in 
> hopes of recommending them to a school, but haven't found one that is 
> cross-platform for those that still need wintel. Besides, I haven't found one 
> that is far enough along so that you don't have to write your own lessons. Any 
> good experiences out there with a particular app? Please let us know.

Gtypist has a full complement of lessons in English and a handful of other 
languages.  It is cross-platform.  Upstream is on the verge of adding a
GUI interface to it, which may be more comfortable for wintel users, but it 
is certainly quite usable with its existing curses interface.  Please see:

	http://www.gnu.org/software/gtypist

You can find the self-extracting wintel packages here:

	http://gtypist.free.fr/releases/

If you have particular needs that aren't currently met by GNU typist, please
drop a note to bug-gtypist@gnu.org.

I have been the Debian maintainer for gtypist ever since I found 'typist' at
the Sunsite ftp archives in 1997.  At that time I did a survey of typing
tutor software available for Linux and could find no other packages.  Nobody
had packaged typist for any Linux distributions that I knew of, so I believe
I made Linux history when I packaged typist for Debian.  For some time
typist remained without an upstream maintainer, then it changed hands a
couple of times before it finally ended up being adopted as a GNU project
and renamed to gtypist.

I communicate regularly with upstream now and am involved in improving
gtypist.  Over the past couple of years we have seen some improvements in
the curses interface, and a fair amount of work on i18n and l10n.  It a
vital project with regular releases, and is the typing tutor I'd bank on
becoming the standard in the free software world.

Ben
-- 
    nSLUG       http://www.nslug.ns.ca      synrg@sanctuary.nslug.ns.ca
    Debian      http://www.debian.org       synrg@debian.org
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