Re: [school-discuss] Tux Paint

[Bill Kendrick <nbs@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Mar 07, 2008 at 10:17:13AM -0500, Jill Frank wrote:
>    Our school in Atlanta is awaiting the arrivial of our Linux system  I've
>    downloaded Tux Paint onto our computers in preparation for MS to be gone.
>    We (teachers and students) love Tux and the ease of use.  Just as Robert
>    said, I'd like to see different saving options.  Is there a way for us to
>    save it to the computer/network so that we can access the pictures to
>    create a class slide show?  Not all of the students are working on the
>    same computer.

Jill - you can ask Tux Paint to save to an alternate directory using the
'savedir' option, either on the command line or in the configuration file.
The "Tux Paint Config." configuration tool exposes this.

Note that right now, the savedir option doesn't expand environment
variables such as "$HOME" or "~" on Unix, or "%USERNAME%" on Windows,
but we plan to add that feature.

In the meantime, your OS shell can do this for you via the command-line.
So, in a shortcut icon in Windows, GNOME or KDE, or in a batch file on
Windows or shell script on Linux, you could do:

  tuxpaint --savedir $USERNAME/tux/

Finally, if you're in a situation where you can't easily separate users
based on an already-mounted network drive (e.g., all kids get the same
location as an "H:" drive on Windows, rather than each "H:" going to a separate
folder on the network), you can use a simply Python script I created to work
around this.

You give the Python script a text file containing names (could be
students, teachers, classes, periods, whatever) and correspoinding directories
to give to Tux Paint via the "--savedir" command-line option.  In other words,
users launch this tool, pick themselves (or what have you) from a list, and
then the tool launches Tux Paint with the proper arguments.

It's pretty unsophisticated, but you can check it out here:

  ftp://ftp.tuxpaint.org/unix/x/tuxpaint/savedir/

Eventually, yes, we'd like to add the ability to bring up the OS file
dialogs, but considering Tux Paint was designed specifically to AVOID this,
and it opens up a whole new can of OS-specific worms^H^H^H^H^Hcode,
we haven't really rushed into it.


Hope that helps!

Good luck!

-bill!