Introduction

iTalc (Intelligent Teaching and Learning with Computers) is a multi-platform classroom management software you can use on both Linux and Windows. Its main features are :

• Overview of multiple classrooms.
• Ability to show a demo to all the selected computers.
• Lets you show a student's screen to all the others.
• Send messages to students
• Lock screens
• Launch applications
• Remotely logout/shutdown/reboot
• Wake-on-lan support (as long as your hardware also does)
• Take screenshots of a student's screen

Here is the default interface for a three clients classroom :

iTalc is in main since Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron and its client part is installed by default in Edubuntu. The packaging is done by the edubuntu-italc-devel team. Those features and changes are done by our packaging:

• Add the ica-launcher script
  • Detects the host (standalone workstation, thin client, terminal server)
  • Generate an IVS and ISD port number based on the previous check
  • Announce the service using Avahi
  • Starts ICA (iTalc's daemon)
• Add the italc-launcher script
  • Detects the host (standalone workstation, thin client, terminal server)
  • Uses avahi to get a list of computers sharing the same public keys and create a classroom based on that
  • Starts iTalc (teacher interface)
• Disable tooltips and taskbar icon by default
• Fix the username gecos removing the ",,," useradd adds on Debian based systems
• Allow installation in LTSP chroots, adding a ldm session script and setting an X property so the terminal server detects the running ICA on the thin client.

Installation on workstations

Installation with LTSP

See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuLTSP/iTalc for LTSP-specific instructions

Adding Windows computers

Testing newer versions

New releases of iTalc are now uploaded to the current development release (Intrepid Ibex), users of Hardy (8.04) can still get updated packages using our PPA. Packages here are the same as in Intrepid and are usually well tested before uploaded. Still, it's not recommended to use them in production without proper testing.

To use those alternate packages, go to : https://launchpad.net/~edubuntu-italc-devel/+archive and update your /etc/apt/sources.list file with the lines from this page.