Mentoring for improving wiki pages?

Wed Jun 16 07:23:01 BST 2010

Στις 15-06-2010, ημέρα Τρι, και ώρα 20:30 -0500, ο/η David Groos έγραψε:
> alkisg told me about a series of scripts that sound great that he uses
> instead of iTALC so I'm going to give them a try.  I'll be writing
> instructions on doing these tasks instead of iTALC unless I move back
> to using iTALC.

It's a Greek app that we developed to meet the needs of our local
schools:
http://wiki.ubuntu-gr.org/sch-scripts/screenshots

I'd like to internationalize and generalize it, but I'm starting my phd
so I won't have time to do it in the next 2 years. I'd be glad to help
if some python/shell programmer wants to do it, though.

It only works on Lucid. The toolbar buttons should replace most of iTalc
functionality, and are:
Wake on lan (the clients should be declared with their macs/hostnames in
lts.conf for this to work - that's done from the -greek- menus), Logoff,
Reboot, Shutdown, Broadcast teacher screen, End broadcast, Execute a
command on the clients, Lock student screens, Unlock student screens,
and Client properties.

The screen broadcasting is about 5 times faster than iTalc, and in my
experience, it's much much more stable. The clients and the users are
autodetected LIVE as they become available - there's no need to put them
in a configuration file. The client daemon only needs 1 MB RAM (=it's
just a /bin/sh). xvnc4viewer is automatically called on demand.
The teacher broadcasting also works in the ldm login screen, where the
users have not logged on yet.
Currently the teacher needs to have sudo rights to run the GUI, but for
the "classroom management" part this requirement could be easily
dropped, as the GUI communicates with the networking backend over a unix
socket owned by some group. So it's very easy to make it so that it can
be used by anyone in the "teachers" group.

The fat/thin chroot generation wizard won't be useful outside of Greece
as it is though, as it's too much focused on local schools. If some
programmer wanted it'd be nice if he generalized it though, as the
generated fat chroot allows for mixed labs (both thin+fat clients can
boot off of it) with min RAM=64Mb. It's working amazingly well.

To sum up: DON'T install it on any production environments without
trying it on a test lab first, and DON'T install it if you're not happy
with only understading the toolbar (the rest is in Greek) :)