Italc

From openSUSE

Didactical monitoring software for Networks

Italc
Client overview in the italc master application.
Developer:	Tobias Doerfel
Package Info (pin)	openSUSE 10.3 openSUSE 10.2 SUSE Linux 10.1
License:	GNU GPLv2
Website:	http://italc.sourceforge.net/

About

iTALC is a powerful software for Linux-networks, which was especially developed for working with computers in school. But it can be also used in other learning-environments. iTALC is a software for teachers using the computer as didactical tool in their lessons. It aims to be a complete replacement for expensive commercial software like MasterEye (tm).

iTALC makes it possible, to access and influence the pupils activities from the computer of the teacher. This way iTALC supports the work with modern equipment in school.

For example the teacher is able to see the content of the pupils screens on his screen. If a student needs help, the teacher can access his desktop and give support while sitting in front of his computer. The pupil can watch all activities, the teacher is doing on his desktop. So the he can learn new processes.

If you want to teach the pupils completely new stuff, you can switch into demo-mode. Then all pupils see what the teacher is doing/demonstrating. It's also possible to let a pupil demonstrate something by redirecting his screen to all screens of the other pupils.

iTALC provides even more features for controlling the pupils computers. For example you can lock all screens, so that the pupils can't continue their work and are forced to turn their attention to the teacher. You can also kill games or internet-browsers, if these things are not part of the lesson.

But there are also some nice features for administrators, making the administration of the computers much easier and more comfortable. For example you can execute one or more commands on every computer without sitting in front of every computer and typing these comands. The execution of X-applications (e.g. Star/OpenOffice-Setup) on all clients with redirection to the local admin-computer is also part of iTALC's featurelist. Furthermore you can shutdown and restart the computers per remote control. If the computers support Wake-on-LAN, it's also possible to turn on all computers from a central place.

Installing and configuring

Here's a short overview about the installation of iTALC on openSUSE. This is a bit different from the normal installation workflow described in the iTALC Wiki.

Installing the right packages

iTALC is provided in three different packages for openSUSE:

If you've enabled the openSUSE-Education repository, all other dependencies are resolved automatically when you install the italc-master or italc-client package.

Basic overview

The following directory structure is provided by the italc package.

Setting up/ Controlling keys

Be shure, that the private keys have limited access rights and are owned by user root and group italc (or the group you want them to belong to).

	chgrp italc /etc/italc/keys/private/*/key chown root /etc/italc/keys/private/*/key chmod 640 /etc/italc/keys/private/*/key

Be shure, the public keys can be read by every person.

	chown root:root /etc/italc/keys/public/*/key chmod 444 /etc/italc/keys/public/*/key

If you need new keys, use the commandline tool ica:

	ica -role teacher -createkeypair

During the first installation of italc-master, the RPM will generate the keys for you. Just control their permissions.

Adding users to control iTALC

Now it's time to add users who can control other desktops later to the italc group. You can use YaST:

Adding users to the italc group using YaST2.

Or the commandline tool groupmod to do this:

	groupmod -A username italc

Open the firewall

To get access to the students desktops, you must also open the port in the firewall on their desktops. Since openSUSE 10.3 this can be done via YaST:

Open the needed firewall ports for iTALC.

Enabling/Disabling iTALC

Now you can enable "ica", the iTALC client, on the clients using the YaST2 /etc/sysconfig-Editor:

Enable the ica service using YaST2 /etc/sysconfig editor

Or just the commandline:

	vi /etc/sysconfig/ica

and acitivate ica by setting the variable ICA_ENABLE to yes:

ICA_ENABLE="yes"

Now you have to re-login to start ica.

Starting iTALC for the first time

Now it's time to start the master controll application: italc. You can find it your desktop menu: "Applications" -> "Edutainment" -> "Teaching" -> "View and remote-control Clients"

The first time you start iTALC, you'll be asked to create a first classroom configuration. Just follow the descriptions in the official iTALC manual to proceed.

See also

• VNC

External Links

• Homepage
• Italc Wiki