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.

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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 ? 🙂

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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

Bluetooth headset support past and future

Posted on 2008/06/08 by Stéphane Graber

First, sorry for not posting about gbtsco and Ubuntu Hardy or answering your comments.

As some of you may know I wrote a software called gbtsco a while ago (feisty or gutsy) that was acting as a frontend to a binary (btsco) which connected to alsa’s snd-bt-sco to connect to a Bluetooth headset.

With Hardy, btsco is now officially deprecated upstream and alsa’s own implementation of it is to be preferred. To have my Logitech headset to work with Ubuntu, all I had to do was to create a .asoundrc file in my home directory with the following content :


pcm.bluetooth {
type bluetooth
device XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
profile "headset"
}

Then put my headset into pairing mode and start a software (twinkle in my case) and select the Bluetooth soundcard in the settings. I hope that we’ll soon have a way to do that graphically (ideally through the gnome-bluetooth applet).

I won’t continue working on gbtsco as it doesn’t have much work to do now and I don’t myself have the time to make it work with .asoundrc. I do really hope to see an upstream effort in implementing that in gnome-bluetooth or any other easy to use configuration tool.

Posted in gbtsco, Planet Ubuntu | 5 Comments