Forum .LRN Q&A: Open ACS Knoppix distro available

Posted by Jonatan Tierno on 09/23/04 06:02 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: Re: Open ACS Knoppix distro available (response to 1)

Posted by Nima Mazloumi on 09/24/04 09:02 AM

Great job,

I suggest that we make this and the windows installer available right from openacs.org, what do you think?

Greetings,
Nima

3: Re: Open ACS Knoppix distro available (response to 2)

Posted by Jonatan Tierno on 09/27/04 10:04 AM

Hello Nima.

Sorry, but I am quite new here and I do you mean with this windows installer, maybe you could explain. The cd does not use the OS installed on the computer, it starts Linux no matter what you had before (of course when you restart without the cd, you get back to the computer installation).

Greetings,

Jonatan

4: CD burning problems available. (response to 1)

Posted by Jonatan Tierno on 10/04/04 09:21 AM

I have reiceved mails saying that there were problems burning the iso because the block size. I had these problems too when I tried with Nero, but I used cdrecord and had no problems at all. The exact order was:

cdrecord -v -eject -data dev=ATAPI:/dev/hdc speed=16 <file_name>.iso

I should have reported this on the first post, sorry about that. Ah, and the iso size is not 690, but 664Mb.

5: English Open ACS Knoppix distro available (response to 1)

Posted by Jonatan Tierno on 10/06/04 06:35 PM

There is an english version of the cd at

http://e-lane.org/knoppix-elane_eng_21-9-04.iso

The cd is exactly the same as the other one, just the knoppix is localized in english (both keyboard and system messages).

6: spanish version problems. (response to 5)

Posted by Jonatan Tierno on 10/15/04 10:11 AM

I have discovered that the spanish version of the cd that is available does not work properly. I've downloaded and burned the english version and this one does work. You can use it until further notice.

7: Solved (response to 6)

Posted by Jonatan Tierno on 10/27/04 07:45 PM

Now you can use the spanish version safely. I´ve also published the md5sums for the files, they are at the same URL than the iso images, changing .iso for .md5

8: Re: Open ACS Knoppix distro available (response to 1)

Posted by Jonatan Tierno on 10/27/04 07:47 PM

A new version of the CD is available, this one with dotLRN 2.1.0 and LORS 0.5. This one takes up 350 MBytes of the hard drive. The dotLRN portal contains four modules of the ECDL course (in Spanish).

You can download the file from:

www.elane.org/knoppix-elane_EN_2004-10-25.iso

www.elane.org/knoppix-elane_ES_2004-10-25.iso

for english or spanish versions (the courses are in Spanish in both, the only change is the default system language). You can also access the md5 sums for both files, at

www.elane.org/knoppix-elane_EN_2004-10-25.md5 and
www.elane.org/knoppix-elane_ES_2004-10-25.md5

You can access the administrator account with:

(Note it is not the same as in the previous one)

If you are using this cd in the same machine where you installed the previous one, first you need to erase the /knoppix_elane file from your hard drive.

Next step (I hope I can have it next week) is include the assesment package. The next version will also require less hard drive space, I hope.

9: Url Mistake (response to 1)

Posted by Jonatan Tierno on 10/27/04 07:59 PM

The URLs in the previous post are incorrect, the right one is www.e-lane.org/...

Sorry about that

10: Re: Open ACS Knoppix distro available (response to 1)

Posted by Christian Paolo Vásquez Chávez on 11/03/04 06:23 PM

I'd just burned the iso, it worked very well for me.

Paolo

11: Re: Open ACS Knoppix distro available (response to 10)

Posted by Jonatan Tierno on 11/04/04 10:45 AM

Great news, thanks for the information.

12: Re: Open ACS Knoppix distro available (response to 1)

Posted by Eduardo Pérez on 10/14/05 07:05 AM

I've made a new release of KNOPPIX E-LANE available at:
http://e-lane.org/pub/

It's based on the latest version of KNOPPIX_V4.0.2CD-2005-09-23-EN and the latest version of e-lane dotlrn distribution.
The installation code has been reworked to solve some past bugs (but there may be new bugs introduced).

Try it if you are interested and let me know of any problems you may find.

13: Cups Error + /KNOPPIX/home/e-lane_conf should be elane_conf (response to 12)

Posted by Kenneth Wyrick on 11/06/05 10:19 PM

cups error message...
Unable to retrieve the printer list. Error message received from manager:
Connection to CUPS server failed. Check that the CUPS server is correctly installed and running. Error: connection refused.

desktop configuration icon reference executable file name should be elane_conf instead of e-lane_conf or the file should be renamed.