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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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