Saturday, December 15, 2007

LTSP Training of Trainers: Day 1

LTSP Training of Trainers finally kicked off today.

It was a cold morning, but everybody was on time. The excitement was simply overwhelming. The program was supposed to start at 9:30am, but you know, some technical difficulties and yadee yadee yadaa, the program finally started at 10:30am! But so far so good, we shortened the initial FOSS and LTSP intro stuffs, and we were back on track..

The trainers and the gonna-be-trainers

Today it was all about Linux fundamentals more than LTSP stuffs. So according to schedule, it was Linux installation, some fundamentals on shell and linux commands and brief Linux networking stuffs. But since the selection of the participants was based on their Linux expertise too, it wasn't hard to make them understand. Some of them were even already familiar with the stuffs that were on the topic.

We all know one single day is not enough to understand even the fundamentals of Linux, but hope it gave the trainees a good snapshot of everything. Hope they're gonna practice more of it at home too..

Hope it was a great start for the first day. Tomorrow we're gonna go into the real LTSP stuffs.. Good luck everybody! It's gonna be fun..

Thursday, December 13, 2007

LTSP Training of Trainers on Saturday and Sunday

We've already selected around 25 eager volunteers for the upcoming LTSP Training of Trainers. The training session will primarily focus on techinical details of Linux/LTSP system like setting up the hardware, setting up the softwares, the basics of Linux system.

Besides, we'd be setting up an e-Library with contents collected uptill now.

The primary motive is to gather a pool of volunteers who will continue the deployment activities in various rural parts of Nepal. Thus the title, Training of Trainers, we hope the volunteers will become trainers in future deployments.

Happy hacking/learning LTSP to all selected candidates!!

Monday, December 10, 2007

Flash Player, msttcorefonts, java, freemind

A) Flash Player
Flash player in the repository didn't install flash player by default because, adobe updated their flash player and the default package gave checksum error.

I followed the ubuntuforums link here

And downloaded the new .deb file from http://launchpadlibrarian.net/10761023/flashplugin-nonfree_9.0.115.0ubuntu2_i386.deb

It installed beautifully.

B) MS core true type font
sudo aptitude install msttcorefonts

C) Sun JRE
sudo aptitude install sun-java6-jre

D) Freemind
Its a nice software, although i haven't used it ;-). Installation is pretty easy, dowload the .deb file from sourceforget link here

downloaded the freemind_0.8.0-1_all.deb
sudo aptitude install freemind_0.8.0-1_all.deb

Everything happily works

Usplash, Sabayon, Gdm Screen and Local USB Mounting

A) Usplash
The usplash was giving resolution problem.
It was fixed by changing the /etc/usplash.conf file and setting
cat /etc/usplash.conf
xres=640
yres=480

B) Sabayon
Now originally the client were successfully logging in, but after sometime they stopped working, it was strange but after debugging and following links below, i found that edubuntu and sabayon (gnomes configuration editor, or sth...)

The discussion links have been posted here exactly my problem
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/edubuntu-users/2007-June/001199.html

then it forwarded to sth ssh related, update ltsp ssh keys
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/edubuntu-users/2007-June/001202.html

in the last link, there was option to simply remove sabayon and well guess what? it worked perfectly!!!
sudo aptitude remove sabayon

I was glad that there wasn't much dependencies related with sabayon.

B.1)Sabayon - HowEVER!!
I reinstalled sabayon watching so many cool stuffs about it on the net. All i needed to do was to add the users/client to the profile and done!!

C) GDM Screen Resolution PRoblem
The server was giving problems with bad gdm login screen, was fixed easily by reconfiguring the x-server
sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

D) Local USB Mount missing!!
Asked about it in #edubuntu in freenode.net and got this link
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ltsp/+bug/160420
and scanning for the fix, got to this place,
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.terminal-server.general/22270

The modifications i made as mentioned in the mailing list above are
a) comment out
env['DISPLAY'] = 'localhost:10.0' to # env['DISPLAY'] = 'localhost:10.0' in
/usr/sbin/ltspfsmounter


b) in file /opt/ltsp/i386/usr/share/ldm/rc.d/S10-delayed-mounter,
add a -X line to ssh connection string like this
ssh -X -S ${LDM_SOCKET} ${LDM_SERVER} "/usr/sbin/ltspfsmounter ${DIR} add"

c) finally update the ltsp image by executing
sudo ltsp-update-image

Good work for today

New Blog

All LTSP deployments by IOE FOSS Community and/or FOSS Nepal will be listed here.

Also bugs, deployment related problems and concerns will be posted. Our day to day blog.