Forum OpenACS Q&A: Open ACS Knoppix distro available

Posted by Jonatan Tierno on 09/23/04 06:01 PM

Hello

I am working for the project E-LANE at the Carlos III university. As part of my work, I have developed a knoppix customized distro that automatically installs and runs an openACS portal, that I hope can be useful for somebody. You can get the .iso file ready to burn at:

http://e-lane.org/knoppix-elane_es_21-9-04.iso

There is another similar cd around. This one has the advantage that it stores data in the hard drive, so the subsites and applications you add to the portal are mantained along different sessions. (Besides, it does not need 512Mb RAM, as the previous one)

It is completely automatic, but needs 200Mb free in a ext2/3 or vfat partition.

Once started (it takes a while the first time), it launches an empty OpenACS portal, with the administrator account:

Later you can erase this administrator and create another, as the data is manained across sessions. To restart the portal, just look for the file /knoppix-elane (it is in the 'root'directory of a partition, for example:
/mnt/hda5/knoppix-elane) and delete it, next time knoppix boots, it will create the empty portal again.

The software version it uses:
Linux 2.4.26
postgreSQL 7.3.4
AOLserver 4.0.5
OpenACS 5.1.1

We would like to hear about bugs, suggestions with more software to install, and any comment. Our goal is to create a Demo CD with .LRN 2.0, LORS and some complete courses included.

(Notes: The .iso size is about 690 Mb, so I recommend downloading it with wget or similar. Its the spanish version, to change locale to english just follow the instruction on the boot screen. There will be an english version soon.)

Jonatan Tierno (mailto:jonatan@it.uc3m.es)

2: Interested in other CD (response to 1)

Posted by Kenneth Wyrick on 10/07/04 01:57 AM

I'm glad to see that you've developed an oacs knoppix distro. It would be great if you would provide a link to the other distro mentioned in your post that uses the hard drive to store data and does not require nearly as much memory as yours does.

I'm downloading the .iso from the link you provided above and will let you know how it goes. I've been using knoppix distros from both:
http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd
and
http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=cd
for a good while. Maybe you could get the one you did for oacs added to the lists and at some point work with me to be able to keep it updated as new oacs releases come out and also get one going for the dotlrn, which i use for the majority of my projects.

Please keep me posted on what you are doing.

3: Re: Interested in other CD (response to 2)

Posted by Jonatan Tierno on 10/07/04 09:54 AM

I think I didn't explain myself. The cd that stores data in hard drive and uses less RAM is the one you can find at the URL I gave. Sorry about that. Anyway, you can get the previous one (which does not store data) at:

http://www.sussdorf.de/knoppix.tar.gz

You can ask about this one to mailto:Bjoern_kiesbye@web.de.

About the lists, I'd rather wait till I get a couple of opinions about it :).

And about dotlrn, currently I am working in another cd with dotlrn 2.1, LORS and ASSESMENT packages, and also some SCORM courses in the cd, to use for demos of the E-LANE project. When I get it working, I'll announce it and make it available.

When you test the cd, please let me know of any problem or suggestion you may have. Thank you very much.

P.D: Could you please direct the next posts to the .LRN Q & A forum? There I posted a message the same as this one (with the same title), and there are some answers already in it. I posted it several times so that more people knew about this... There are also some data about the burning proccess and more you may want to know.