Simple Games for Cheap Android Tablet

My Autistic son has developed quite a liking for hand held electronic devices - he likes our daughter's Nintendo DS with an animated dog on it, and apparently plays with an iPad at school.
I am not a fan of 'i' anythings because of the difficulty developing software for them, so I thought I would get him a cheap android based tablet to try.   Just need some software for it now.

I have got a Eken M009S from Amazon - it was just under £70.   I was hoping to develop some simple games using javascript to run in the web browser, which would mean they would work on any device, but the processor on the device is not up to it - there are some nice javascript game demos at http://kevs3d.co.uk/dev/ which work very well on my laptop, but are so slow on the tablet that they are not useable.

This is a shame as it would have been nice to develop something that would work on any platform - I think I will have to remember how to write 'native' (or at least java) android programs....

Access Web Server on VirtualBox Guest

I have a Windows computer where I use Oracle VirtualBox to allow me to run Ubuntu Linux.
I just found out how to access the web server on the virtual machine from the Windows Host.
You need to use the vboxmanage command that comes with virtualbox:
First do:

vboxmanage list vms

to list the names all of the virtual machines on the computer, then do:

vboxmanage modifyvm "[virtual machine name]" --natpf1 "http,tcp,,8080,,80"

You can then point your web browser on the windows host to http://localhost:8080 to see the web server on the virtual machine.

I don't know the syntax - see the VirtualBox Manual, Chapter 6 for details.

Ubuntu Linux on a Packard Bell OneTwo - Update

The Packard Bell OneTwo touch screen computer has not been used for quite a while, so I decided to start using it rather than my daughter's PC, because it uses a lot less power and is quieter.

The main issues from when I tried it before were:

• Screen flicker every now and then
• Touch screen calibration issues.

We installed Ubuntu 11.10 on it as a clean install.  Went pretty well.  The issues were:

1. Used a normal screen shape rather than wide screen.   Solved this by going to the settings / display menu and changing to a 16:10 aspect ratio screen resolution.
2. Touch Screen Calibration:  This took a while to solve because when you pressed the screen the mouse pointer appeared at a different position.  Eventually I traced it to the display settings that I had altered - Although there is only one monitor on the computer, the software detects two displays (there must be tv-out hardware in the box, but no connector outside).  I had un-clicked the 'mirror displays' option and this had resulted in the two screens being shown side by side.  I didn't think anything of it as there is no monitor connected to the second, but it confused the touch screen calibration - switching the un-used display to 'off' solved it and the touch screen calibration is fine now.
3. Multi-Touch:  The touch screen works just like a mouse.  I think it should be able to cope with multiple touches so you can do 'pinch' gestures etc. to re-size windows.  This is not working.   I tried using the mtview utility as described in the Ubuntu wiki, and it seems like multi touch is working - you can draw with two fingers at the same time, but the window manager does not seem to be using them.

Therefore, Ubuntu 11.10 worked much better 'out of the box' than the previous version I had tried - the main missing thing is multi-touch support for the touch screen.  This is an important one to fix for me because our son is VERY short sighted, and looks very closely at the screen, often pressing his forehead against it.  Once he has done that, the touch screen does not work because it only detects one press at a time!   I am going to have to learn how x windows input devices work to debug this I think.....