As I have a small currently 5.5 years old Kid Dimitar at home and i'm doing my best to make him learn new things and advance in different areas of life and knowledge.
Today Decided to introduce him to Linux4Kids gcompris a KDE educational set of games for small children.
Once installed with simple
# apt install gcompris-qt
It works fine and default version installable from default Debian distribution is fine, except it does not support Bulgarian.
That is again not a nice suprise, as even some pseudo languages like Belarusian are there to set but Bulgarian missing on the default installable pack:
# dpkg -l |grep -i gcompris
ii gcompris-qt 3.1-2 amd64 educational games for small children
ii gcompris-qt-data 3.1-2 all data files for gcompris-qt
After some tampering and unable to find a native .deb port of the latest release and my undesire to move from debian 12 (bookworm) Desktop Linux laptop at the moment to Debian 13 Trixie, i've finally found a way to install it via flatpak:
For those who never used snap package ecosystem or flatpak, here is a shortly synthesis on it:
Flatpak is an open-source, next-generation framework for building, distributing, and running sandboxed desktop applications on Linux.
It enables developers to package apps once and run them on any Linux distribution by including all necessary dependencies.
Flatpak improves security by isolating applications from the host system.
Flatpaks are containerized applications. They require more space because the bring along their own versions of their dependencies instead of relying on system versions.
While a single application will have greater space requirements, the base images [and potentially overlays] will get shared between them and each successive flatpak will potentially require less overhead.
The pros to using them is that flatpaks are often more current than their distribution packaged versions and they are somewhat isolated from the base system. The cons are that they're not managed with the rest of your system packages, can have slower start times, occasionally have permissions issues, and take up more space.
In some cases, flatpak is a better choice. Sometimes, it's not, and there's no way we can really determine that for you.
Tried up to my best to install the newest version of gcompris which as of time of writting this blog post is gcompris 25.1
# apt info flatpak|grep -i 'descr' -A8 -B8
WARNING: apt does not have a stable CLI interface. Use with caution in scripts.
Recommends: ca-certificates, default-dbus-system-bus | dbus-system-bus, desktop-file-utils, hicolor-icon-theme, gtk-update-icon-cache, libpam-systemd, p11-kit, polkitd | policykit-1, shared-mime-info, xdg-desktop-portal (>= 1.6), xdg-desktop-portal-gtk (>= 1.6) | xdg-desktop-portal-backend, xdg-user-dirs
Suggests: avahi-daemon, malcontent-gui
Conflicts: xdg-app
Replaces: xdg-app
Homepage: https://flatpak.org/
Download-Size: 1,400 kB
APT-Manual-Installed: yes
APT-Sources: http://ftp.debian.org/debian bookworm/main amd64 Packages
Description: Application deployment framework for desktop apps
Flatpak installs, manages and runs sandboxed desktop application bundles.
Application bundles run partially isolated from the wider system, using
containerization techniques such as namespaces to prevent direct access
to system resources. Resources from outside the sandbox can be accessed
via "portal" services, which are responsible for access control; for
example, the Documents portal displays an "Open" dialog outside the
sandbox, then allows the application to access only the selected file.
# apt install flatpak
# flatpak remote-add –if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
# flatpak install flathub org.kde.gcompris
# flatpak run org.kde.gcompris
If you have sound glitches of gcompris on Older laptops install all necessery for pipewire run it like that:
# apt install pipewire pipewire-audio-client-libraries pipewire-pulse
Try to run it manually with:
# env PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=60 ; flatpak run org.kde.gcompris
If still sound glithches are present a workaround is to tune PipeWire buffer/quantum size:
PipeWire buffer/quantum size too aggressive?
Many crackling issues come from too small quantum. Create ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d/99-custom.conf
# vim ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf.d/99-custom.conf
and add:textcontext.properties = {
default.clock.rate = 48000
default.clock.quantum = 1024
default.clock.min-quantum = 512
default.clock.max-quantum = 2048
}#systemctl –user restart pipewire pipewire-pulse
Create a new wrapper script to run you gcompris easily
# vim /usr/local/bin/gcompris.sh
#!/bin/bash
# little hack script to make music streamed via pulseaudio to not have severe glitches when running gcompris latest release on debian 12
# through flatpak
# if not working run cmd
# systemctl –user restart pipewire
LANG=bg_BG.UTF-8
SDL_AUDIODRIVER=pulseaudio
#flatpak run –device=all –socket=pulseaudio org.kde.gcompris
flatpak override –user –env=SDL_AUDIODRIVER=pulseaudio org.kde.gcompris
flatpak override –user –filesystem=~/.config/pipewire:ro org.kde.gcompris
LANG=bg_BG.UTF-8 flatpak run –socket=pulseaudio org.kde.gcompris# chmod +x /usr/local/bin/gcompris.sh
Hence I run the wrapper script and let the kid enjoy the nice educational stuff while I enjoyed the nice kiddish peaceful music !
# /usr/local/bin/gcompris.sh
P.S. ! If you get issues with pipewire (if you're using one instead of pulseaudio as I do with my Mate desktop environment you can restart it and relaunch the gcompris nice addition to tux4kids (see my previous article Tux for Kids (Tux Math, Tux Paint, Tux Typing) 3 games to develop your children Intellect):
# systemctl –user restart pipewire
Enjoy Gcompris !
