Applications for work

Yes we also have to work a little bit and it’s for sure that computers can help us work… To help children understand this other role of computers, about ten relatively simple applications are available. Some of them may only be useful to Dad and Mum to help out. You will see that the proposed work is not so hard indeed!

Work applications are briefly described on this page. A list of these applications as well as a list of links to their web sites are as follows:

• opendict
• gcalctool
• gedit
• empathy
• epiphany-browser
• pcmanfm
• eog
• evince
• xarchiver

OpenDict

OpenDict

As you can guess, this is a multi-language translation dictionary. It is installed along with some dictionaries but can also be configured to fetch dictionaries from the Internet. Moreover, English words can be pronounced thanks to an extra speech synthesis system.

Gcalctool

Gcalctool

This is simply a calculator. It is configured to display its easiest mode which just shows the 4 basic operations. Nevertheless advanced modes can be activated in its “Display” menu to get access to more advanced or very advanced functions.

Gedit

Gedit

Gedit is a small text editor. Instead of providing full-featured text processing software, we believe that children can be content with a simple text editor to start typing their own texts. Generally the layout is not their priority (let’s help them match punctuation and upper case rules first!), and anyway they would only need a tiny part of all the features of text processing software.

Empathy

Empathy + chat theme 2

Empathy

Empathy is instant messaging software. It can obviously discuss with Google Talk, MSN or even Facebook, but it is configured in DoudouLinux just to be able to talk with machines from the local network. Just plug the network on your DoudouLinux computers and this should work! This way children can be initiated to this type of Internet communication without the need to create them an account and without the risk for them to get in touch with anybody on the Internet…

When Empathy is started, a small DoudouLinux-specific tool is showed to let the user set his (her) nickname on the network. Then Empathy is started, which just adds a green light in the top panel. You have to click on it to show the list of your neighbors on the local network.

Empathy nickname dialog

Neighbors on the local network

Epiphany browser

Epiphany Browser

This is a web browser based on Mozilla Firefox technologies. It features ad-blocking and popup blocking for a better web browsing experience. On the other hand it is not compatible with the Firefox plugins system. However it is lighter, simpler to configure and faster than Firefox, this is why DoudouLinux integrated it in place of Firefox.

PcManFm

PCManFm

PCManFM is a file manager. Again it was chosen in place of more advanced file managers because of its lightness and its quickness. As a result it provides only partial file previewing in their icons. Don’t forget that DoudouLinux thinks that children will learn to manage their files later…

Eye of Gnome (eog)

Eog

Eog is an image file viewer that can display various image or photo formats. It is not some kind of photo editing software, which should a priori be of no interest for children. At most you will be able to rotate photos right or left when they are not taken horizontally.

Evince

Evince

This is a PDF file viewer. The interest for children is obviously relatively small except that documents in PDF format are quite often encountered. For instance the user documentation accompanying DoudouLinux is in PDF format!

Xarchiver

Xarchiver

This is an archive file manager which handles several formats like zip, tar, rar and 7zip. Even if this application may not be really useful, we provide it in case some compressed files would be downloaded from the Internet. It may be removed from further DoudouLinux versions.