Mentoring for improving wiki pages?

[Simón Ruiz]

On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 5:37 PM, David Groos <djgroos at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I just turned in my final last night for my statistics class so can now
> dedicate some more time to edubuntu, again, and, teaching will be out for
> the year in just about 4 weeks.  Like many users of edubuntu, I need help to
> install/upgrade/troubleshoot/fix things.  One key resource for self-help is
> the wiki.  People have been working hard to improve it as a whole.  I'm
> suggesting to choose maybe a dozen 'hot spots'--topics that are critical to
> make edubuntu work in a school setting, and make great wiki pages on them.
>
> A perfect example of what I'm talking about is the work of Gavin and his
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuLTSP/ThinClientHowtoNAT page.  While
> it is true that 3 other people have also improved that page, Gavin made a
> big effort to make sure this critical task was CLEARLY and thoroughly
> explained.  There is no such thing as perfect but there is excellent and
> that page is.
>
> I've spent I don't know how many hours battling iTALC and alkisg has spent
> at least 2 or 3 hours trying to help me.  He one time groaned when I told
> him that I had followed the directions on the wiki.  These might have been
> pretty good for Hardy, but I had Jaunty and just hoped it would work; it
> didn't, nor does it still.
>
> Here are some possible 'sticky points'.  There might be some good wiki pages
> on them now, but when I first tackled these tasks, they were lacking.  They
> are critical to many school setups.
>
> --iTALC setup
> --Basic squid proxy setup
> --Localapps setup
> --Backup System
> --using flash
> --using java
> --setting up file-sharing systems for one's classes
>
> I need to understand iTALC and make it work.   I would be more than happy to
> polish this iTALC wiki page.  I'll need mentoring, a lot at the start, but a
> great wiki page saves time for everyone and helps edubuntu users feel
> confident.  Is there anyone who knows iTALC that would serve as my technical
> mentor on this wiki page?  What would you add to or remove from the list of
> sticky points?

I had quite a bit of experience with iTALC back in 2006, in fact the
article I wrote back then on compiling iTALC from source for Dapper
<http://indianalinux.blogspot.com/2007/02/howto-install-italc-from-source-on.html>
is still, according to Google Analytics, the single most visited
article on my somewhat comatose blog.

My big problem was simply that there weren't up to date iTALC packages
for Ubuntu, and building from source gave me that.

I was working on just "normal" Desktops, though, so I have
*absolutely* no experience with iTALC on LTSP. (no experience with
LTSP yet, really)

Still, I may be able to help if your questions are basically just
iTALC-related. What problems are you having?

> David G

Simón R

P.S. Just in case you're unaware: iTALC 1.x development ground to a
halt as the developer (a college student who codes in his free time)
works on version 2.0. The latest version, 1.0.10, was just released
after a couple of years break, and it pretty much just includes bug
fixes.