Setting Up a Lernid Event

If you are organizing a learning week and want to use Lernid, you will need to create a server-side Lernid configuration file. This file should be called <something>.lernid. Here is an example:

[Ubuntu Example Week]

homepage: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuExampleWeek
icalurl: http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/canonical.com_96jtlbrmpltiogmjhlgl3rd0o0%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics
classroom: jono-test
chat: ubuntu-classroom-chat
eventstart: 2009-12-21 12:00:00
eventend: 2009-12-25 15:00:00

There can be multiple events in one configuration file. Each event should specify the following settings:

• homepage - the event website that is loaded into the Lernid browser when a user connects.

• icalurl - the iCal feed that contains all the sessions.

• classroom - the name of the classroom IRC channel on freenode without the leading hash (#).

• chat - the name of the chat IRC channel on freenode without the leading hash (#).

• eventstart - the start date and time (in UTC) of the event. You must ensure the format here is YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.

• eventend - the end date and time (in UTC) of the event. You must ensure the format here is YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.

If a session has slides in it, you should ensure that the Description field in the iCal event has the following:

Slides: http://www.website.com/slidesdocument.pdf

The slides can be hosted anywhere and have any name in the document, but they must be a PDF. OpenOffice.org can easily save an Impress presentation as a PDF file. Please also be conscious that when a session starts, all Lernid viewers will download these slides, so make sure the slides are somewhere with a healthy chunk of bandwidth.

Connecting your users to the event

When you have created the configuration file you need to make it available to your users. Usually you would do this by uploading it to a public server but you could also distribute it some other way, fx. by email. To connect to your event, your users need to run lernid like this:

lernid --config http://your.server.com/your-event.lernid

or if you have distributed the file to each user individually:

lernid --config /path/to/your-event.lernid

Lernid should now open and your event should be selectable from the drop down box.