Category Archives: iTalc

Intrepid’s release is approaching pretty fast now.
I have (indirectly :), thanks Oliver) uploaded iTalc 1.0.9 to Intrepid’s main repository in late July and got so far no new bugs on Launchpad.
I know some of you are using it and while I consider the current upstream code and packaging to be quite good, I really doubt we have a bugfree release there 🙂

Can you, user of italc, please give me some feedback on the problems you currently are observing with the latest version ?
To report your bugs, https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/italc/+filebug is the place.

To learn more about iTalc and the various ways of installing it, you can read: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/iTalc (work in progress)

And if you want to help testing iTalc but don’t want to upgrade to Intrepid, you can try the packages from our PPA: https://launchpad.net/~edubuntu-italc-devel/+archive

The main difference from what’s currently in Hardy and what we have in Intrepid is avahi support meaning your computers should now automatically appear in iTalc as long as the keys in /etc/italc/ are the same.

iTalc (intelligent teaching and learning with computers) is a multi-platform (Linux and Windows) classroom management software used by many schools in the world.

It replaced the thin-client-manager (tcm) in Ubuntu Hardy and has been improved since then until the first upload to Intrepid last night.
The uploaded version is 1.0.9-rc3, so it’s still a release candidate and should only be used for testing purpose but it’s pretty stable and just lacks some final changes to become 1.0.9.

Yesterday, italc’s #1 bug in Ubuntu has been debugged and a workaround has now been uploaded to Intrepid. This bug was causing “ica” (the client daemon) to randomly crash when the teacher interface is closed. It was causing clients to disappear from the network and was a real pain for most iTalc users.

If you experienced this bug in the past or want to give us a hand at providing the most stable iTalc in Intrepid, please use the version uploaded today to Intrepid (1.0.9-rc3-0ubuntu2) or if you are using Hardy, download the hardy packages from: http://www.stgraber.org/download/ubuntu/italc/. You can get i386 and amd64 packages from there and also the .ddebs so you can give us a proper backtrace in case of crash (why can’t you get -dbgsym with a PPA ?).

Those new packages also let you install iTalc inside a LTSP chroot so iTalc is running on the thin clients themselves instead of the server. It also adds avahi support, announcing the stations on the network and generating a new “Auto-detected computers” classroom from that.

As soon as iTalc 1.0.9 final will be released, packages will be uploaded to the edubuntu-italc-devel PPA for Hardy and Intrepid, then uploaded to Intrepid and a backport will be requested for Hardy.

If you find a bug in iTalc and what to report it, the easiest is to go through Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/italc/+filebug