Category Archives: Planet Ubuntu

Computer names

Posted on 2008/09/13 by Stéphane Graber

To continue with the meme that’s going on Planet Ubuntu, here is my computers name:
– Dakara
– Vagonbrei
– Castiana
– P4X-123 (Will be used for DHCP client 123) (Milky way galaxy)
– P3R-123 (Will be used for VPN client 123) (Pegasus galaxy)

You may have recognized those names, they are all taken from Stargate SG1 and Atlantis, series that I watch for several years now. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planets_in_Stargate

For ISO testing, I’m usually using: – so ubuntu-i386 for example.
For my development Xen VMs, I use the boring but efficient naming: xenXX (xen04 is the test VM for Ubuntu Brainstorm and the QA team websites)

My LAN routers are usually called with router- so I currently have:
– router-roubaix (Roubaix, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, FR) (VPN gateway)
– router-bevaix (Bevaix, NE, CH) (Family house)
– router-neuchatel (Neuchâtel, NE, CH) (Grandma’s house)
– router-sherbrooke (Sherbrooke, QC, CA) (Home)

And other LAN computers are usually named after their owner and their type, using –. (Standard boring naming)

Posted in Planet Ubuntu | Tagged | Leave a comment

Feedback on iTalc in Intrepid

Posted on 2008/09/13 by Stéphane Graber

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.

Posted in iTalc, Planet Ubuntu | Leave a comment

Moving to Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada

Posted on 2008/07/31 by Stéphane Graber

On Wednesday 6th of August I’ll be taking a plane from Geneva, CH to Frankfurt, DE, then a transatlantic flight to Montreal, QC, CA to finally go by car to Sherbrooke.

That’s right I’m leaving good old Switzerland where I past the last 18 years (well, all my live in fact) to move to Canada starting to work for RevolutionLinux on the Monday 11th.

That’ll be a bit of a change as I finished school only less than a month ago but that’ll be for sure a lot of fun, what else could that be than being paid for doing things you usually do on your free time ? 🙂

Posted in Planet Ubuntu | Leave a comment

iTalc 1.0.9 RC3, needs testing

Posted on 2008/06/24 by Stéphane Graber

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 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

Posted in iTalc, Planet Ubuntu | 1 Comment

Pastebinit now in Debian

Posted on 2008/06/10 by Stéphane Graber

Thanks to Rolf Leggewie, Pastebinit 0.10 is now in Debian (unstable and testing) and has been synced in Intrepid.
I can now use the time I previously spent on packaging Pastebinit (not that much …) to actually work on it and add new pastebins.

For those of you who don’t know what Pastebinit is, here is the description taken from the Debian package :

pastebinit is a command-line tool to send data to a “pastebin”: a web site which allows its users to upload snippets of text for public viewing.

It can receive data from a pipe or from a file passed as argument.
It supports these pastebins:

  • http://*.pastebin.com
  • http://pastebin.mozilla.org
  • http://rafb.net
  • http://yourpaste.net
  • http://paste.ubuntu.com
  • http://*.paste.f-box.org
  • http://*.1t2.us
  • http://paste.stgraber.org

It’s a very useful tool on servers and I also use it a lot with thin clients to easily submit debugging informations.
Examples could be:
– pastebinit /etc/X11/xorg.conf
– ps aux | pastebinit –
– free | pastebinit -b http://paste.ubuntu.com –

Bugs can be reported on Launchpad

Posted in pastebinit, Planet Ubuntu | 29 Comments