Re: [Server-devel] [XSCE] End User Documentation / Basic Setup Guide / How to upload PDFs etc
On Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 9:05 PM, Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu wrote: (Snipped) A couple of notes on the *installation* of Pathagar, where we do have a bunch of problems: 1) The *current* version of Pathagar is borked. I haven't gone back to see where it fails or how, but there should be a prior version that works. There is also a version (patch) that apparently fixes the book edit and upload problem. I have not tested it. I hope someone else can take a look? https://github.com/PathagarBooks/pathagar/issues I'm the one who send this pull request. We are testing this patch and other changes also while trying to integrate pathagar book server in XSCE 0.5 release. The details are in 2 pull request in XSCE github repo [1]. 2) There seem to be multiple deployment approaches. We have PIP, RPM, fabric, and the good old way of installing and configuring by hand (which is what I follow, because I haven't had the time to test the other methods). At the OLPC SF Summit, Jerry told me that they have the RPM part addressed, but the current bug (cannot add/edit books) gets in the way. We are using ansible to deploy pathagar. Ansible uses a YAML playbook and I think it's possible to follow it even if you are not familiar with the tool [2]. Currently I get pathagar source code from a personal cloned repository that includes some patches over the current upstream master branch [3]. Hopefully the latest patch can address these things. As I said, I have more patched waiting to send upstream. Later, I'll send more details but just to the pathagar mail list. 1: https://github.com/XSCE/xsce/pull/47 and https://github.com/XSCE/xsce/pull/74 2: https://github.com/migonzalvar/xsce/blob/fa8292/roles/pathagar/tasks/main.yml 3: https://github.com/migonzalvar/pathagar/tree/xsce-devel -- Miguel González Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: [Server-devel] [XSCE] End User Documentation / Basic Setup Guide / How to upload PDFs etc
On Sat, Nov 16, 2013 at 8:15 PM, Anna ascho...@gmail.com wrote: Pathagar is still a work in progress. I'm not sure if it can handle pdfs, though. Last I saw, it was just epubs. By design, Pathagar will serve *any* kind of file. The file serving is done via HTTP (Can be apache, nginx, or lighttpd, etc). Here is an example of PDF: http://108.171.173.65/book/10/view and here's an example of epub: http://108.171.173.65/book/8/view Pathagar itself doesn't care about the file format, as long as the http server has a way (MIME) to handle it. As far as the Pathagar software itself is concerned, there are no showstopping bugs that I know of. A couple of notes on the *installation* of Pathagar, where we do have a bunch of problems: 1) The *current* version of Pathagar is borked. I haven't gone back to see where it fails or how, but there should be a prior version that works. There is also a version (patch) that apparently fixes the book edit and upload problem. I have not tested it. I hope someone else can take a look? https://github.com/PathagarBooks/pathagar/issues 2) There seem to be multiple deployment approaches. We have PIP, RPM, fabric, and the good old way of installing and configuring by hand (which is what I follow, because I haven't had the time to test the other methods). At the OLPC SF Summit, Jerry told me that they have the RPM part addressed, but the current bug (cannot add/edit books) gets in the way. Hopefully the latest patch can address these things. For your immediate purposes, I'd suggest `mkdir /var/www/html/science` and put the pdfs there. Then clients can go to http://schoolserver/science to download them. Anna On Sat, Nov 16, 2013 at 10:05 PM, Curt Thompson curtathomp...@gmail.com wrote: So I've been tinkering around XSCE School Server for a while now - I have it set up with Internet-in-a-box via USB drive and I spent a while trying to get my laptop to work as AP/server. I've also been poking around looking for basic setup info. In particular, I'm trying to upload these ~36 Science Textbook PDFs and I'm not sure where to put them, if I should just be copying them to some directory (etc/Moodle or etc/pathagar or /library/pathagar/media?) or uploading them via one of these systems. Any advice on which method is best? I've looked around the Wiki but I can't find anything like a basic setup guide (such as a reference that could be used by teachers, students, and/or volunteers in the field.) Is there such a guide? -- Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Professor, Information Systems San Francisco State University http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://commons.sfsu.edu/ http://olpcsf.org/ http://olpcjamaica.org.jm/ ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: [Server-devel] [XSCE] End User Documentation / Basic Setup Guide / How to upload PDFs etc
If possible, deploy epubs rather than pdfs. You can always convert an epub to a pdf. You can't easily do it the other way round. Go ahead and search, the pdf format is a bane for people who use ereaders. Also, epubs open from the Journal in the Read Activity, where kids can use bookmarks. PDFs open in Browse and there's no bookmarking mechanism. So you're halfway through a PDF, shut down your XO for the day, then the next morning open the PDF back up and have to scroll to where you left off. Not cool. On Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 8:38 PM, Curt Thompson curtathomp...@gmail.comwrote: In the short term, I just followed Anna's suggestion and put the PDFs in a directory I made /var/www/html/science. I tested it out with the Browse activity in the XO-1 James is lending me as a client and it seems to work relatively well - opens in-browser, which is nice. Not super fast but the images/text load up within a few seconds and it's scrollable with the buttons near the monitor (once you click inside the PDF). I'm considering whether it's worth it to extract each page as an image and convert all these PDFs into essentially an HTML-based e-book to make it more responsive. In the long term, I'd like to be able to train teachers in how to add content. If we can send them a USB stick with PDFs, for example, it'd be nice for them to be able to simply copy it into place and enjoy the updated content. Would this be the case once I got Pathagar set up and working? I'll also work on documentation when I can. I started to write setup documentation but the online install info on the wiki is pretty good. What's missing (in my humble opinion) is what to do with XSCE once it's up and running. I'll try to make some time to document the things I learn as I go. Thanks for the help On 11/17/2013 12:05 PM, Sameer Verma wrote: On Sat, Nov 16, 2013 at 8:15 PM, Anna ascho...@gmail.com wrote: Pathagar is still a work in progress. I'm not sure if it can handle pdfs, though. Last I saw, it was just epubs. By design, Pathagar will serve *any* kind of file. The file serving is done via HTTP (Can be apache, nginx, or lighttpd, etc). Here is an example of PDF: http://108.171.173.65/book/10/view and here's an example of epub: http://108.171.173.65/book/8/view Pathagar itself doesn't care about the file format, as long as the http server has a way (MIME) to handle it. As far as the Pathagar software itself is concerned, there are no showstopping bugs that I know of. A couple of notes on the *installation* of Pathagar, where we do have a bunch of problems: 1) The *current* version of Pathagar is borked. I haven't gone back to see where it fails or how, but there should be a prior version that works. There is also a version (patch) that apparently fixes the book edit and upload problem. I have not tested it. I hope someone else can take a look? https://github.com/PathagarBooks/pathagar/issues 2) There seem to be multiple deployment approaches. We have PIP, RPM, fabric, and the good old way of installing and configuring by hand (which is what I follow, because I haven't had the time to test the other methods). At the OLPC SF Summit, Jerry told me that they have the RPM part addressed, but the current bug (cannot add/edit books) gets in the way. Hopefully the latest patch can address these things. For your immediate purposes, I'd suggest `mkdir /var/www/html/science` and put the pdfs there. Then clients can go to http://schoolserver/scienceto download them. Anna On Sat, Nov 16, 2013 at 10:05 PM, Curt Thompson curtathomp...@gmail.com wrote: So I've been tinkering around XSCE School Server for a while now - I have it set up with Internet-in-a-box via USB drive and I spent a while trying to get my laptop to work as AP/server. I've also been poking around looking for basic setup info. In particular, I'm trying to upload these ~36 Science Textbook PDFs and I'm not sure where to put them, if I should just be copying them to some directory (etc/Moodle or etc/pathagar or /library/pathagar/media?) or uploading them via one of these systems. Any advice on which method is best? I've looked around the Wiki but I can't find anything like a basic setup guide (such as a reference that could be used by teachers, students, and/or volunteers in the field.) Is there such a guide? ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: [Server-devel] [XSCE] End User Documentation / Basic Setup Guide / How to upload PDFs etc
I thought read also opened pdf's from the journal too. (Not sure if it saves what page you were on). On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 9:46 AM, Anna ascho...@gmail.com wrote: If possible, deploy epubs rather than pdfs. You can always convert an epub to a pdf. You can't easily do it the other way round. Go ahead and search, the pdf format is a bane for people who use ereaders. Also, epubs open from the Journal in the Read Activity, where kids can use bookmarks. PDFs open in Browse and there's no bookmarking mechanism. So you're halfway through a PDF, shut down your XO for the day, then the next morning open the PDF back up and have to scroll to where you left off. Not cool. On Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 8:38 PM, Curt Thompson curtathomp...@gmail.comwrote: In the short term, I just followed Anna's suggestion and put the PDFs in a directory I made /var/www/html/science. I tested it out with the Browse activity in the XO-1 James is lending me as a client and it seems to work relatively well - opens in-browser, which is nice. Not super fast but the images/text load up within a few seconds and it's scrollable with the buttons near the monitor (once you click inside the PDF). I'm considering whether it's worth it to extract each page as an image and convert all these PDFs into essentially an HTML-based e-book to make it more responsive. In the long term, I'd like to be able to train teachers in how to add content. If we can send them a USB stick with PDFs, for example, it'd be nice for them to be able to simply copy it into place and enjoy the updated content. Would this be the case once I got Pathagar set up and working? I'll also work on documentation when I can. I started to write setup documentation but the online install info on the wiki is pretty good. What's missing (in my humble opinion) is what to do with XSCE once it's up and running. I'll try to make some time to document the things I learn as I go. Thanks for the help On 11/17/2013 12:05 PM, Sameer Verma wrote: On Sat, Nov 16, 2013 at 8:15 PM, Anna ascho...@gmail.com wrote: Pathagar is still a work in progress. I'm not sure if it can handle pdfs, though. Last I saw, it was just epubs. By design, Pathagar will serve *any* kind of file. The file serving is done via HTTP (Can be apache, nginx, or lighttpd, etc). Here is an example of PDF: http://108.171.173.65/book/10/view and here's an example of epub: http://108.171.173.65/book/8/view Pathagar itself doesn't care about the file format, as long as the http server has a way (MIME) to handle it. As far as the Pathagar software itself is concerned, there are no showstopping bugs that I know of. A couple of notes on the *installation* of Pathagar, where we do have a bunch of problems: 1) The *current* version of Pathagar is borked. I haven't gone back to see where it fails or how, but there should be a prior version that works. There is also a version (patch) that apparently fixes the book edit and upload problem. I have not tested it. I hope someone else can take a look? https://github.com/PathagarBooks/pathagar/issues 2) There seem to be multiple deployment approaches. We have PIP, RPM, fabric, and the good old way of installing and configuring by hand (which is what I follow, because I haven't had the time to test the other methods). At the OLPC SF Summit, Jerry told me that they have the RPM part addressed, but the current bug (cannot add/edit books) gets in the way. Hopefully the latest patch can address these things. For your immediate purposes, I'd suggest `mkdir /var/www/html/science` and put the pdfs there. Then clients can go to http://schoolserver/science to download them. Anna On Sat, Nov 16, 2013 at 10:05 PM, Curt Thompson curtathomp...@gmail.com wrote: So I've been tinkering around XSCE School Server for a while now - I have it set up with Internet-in-a-box via USB drive and I spent a while trying to get my laptop to work as AP/server. I've also been poking around looking for basic setup info. In particular, I'm trying to upload these ~36 Science Textbook PDFs and I'm not sure where to put them, if I should just be copying them to some directory (etc/Moodle or etc/pathagar or /library/pathagar/media?) or uploading them via one of these systems. Any advice on which method is best? I've looked around the Wiki but I can't find anything like a basic setup guide (such as a reference that could be used by teachers, students, and/or volunteers in the field.) Is there such a guide? ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: [Server-devel] [XSCE] End User Documentation / Basic Setup Guide / How to upload PDFs etc
What, Browse loses the reading position for a PDF? Let's fix Browse? ;-) On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 09:54:22AM +0530, Anish Mangal wrote: I thought read also opened pdf's from the journal too. (Not sure if it saves what page you were on). On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 9:46 AM, Anna ascho...@gmail.com wrote: If possible, deploy epubs rather than pdfs. You can always convert an epub to a pdf. You can't easily do it the other way round. Go ahead and search, the pdf format is a bane for people who use ereaders. Also, epubs open from the Journal in the Read Activity, where kids can use bookmarks. PDFs open in Browse and there's no bookmarking mechanism. So you're halfway through a PDF, shut down your XO for the day, then the next morning open the PDF back up and have to scroll to where you left off. Not cool. On Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 8:38 PM, Curt Thompson curtathomp...@gmail.com wrote: In the short term, I just followed Anna's suggestion and put the PDFs in a directory I made /var/www/html/science. I tested it out with the Browse activity in the XO-1 James is lending me as a client and it seems to work relatively well - opens in-browser, which is nice. Not super fast but the images/text load up within a few seconds and it's scrollable with the buttons near the monitor (once you click inside the PDF). I'm considering whether it's worth it to extract each page as an image and convert all these PDFs into essentially an HTML-based e-book to make it more responsive. In the long term, I'd like to be able to train teachers in how to add content. If we can send them a USB stick with PDFs, for example, it'd be nice for them to be able to simply copy it into place and enjoy the updated content. Would this be the case once I got Pathagar set up and working? I'll also work on documentation when I can. I started to write setup documentation but the online install info on the wiki is pretty good. What's missing (in my humble opinion) is what to do with XSCE once it's up and running. I'll try to make some time to document the things I learn as I go. Thanks for the help On 11/17/2013 12:05 PM, Sameer Verma wrote: On Sat, Nov 16, 2013 at 8:15 PM, Anna ascho...@gmail.com wrote: Pathagar is still a work in progress. I'm not sure if it can handle pdfs, though. Last I saw, it was just epubs. By design, Pathagar will serve *any* kind of file. The file serving is done via HTTP (Can be apache, nginx, or lighttpd, etc). Here is an example of PDF: http://108.171.173.65/book/10/view and here's an example of epub: http://108.171.173.65/book/8/view Pathagar itself doesn't care about the file format, as long as the http server has a way (MIME) to handle it. As far as the Pathagar software itself is concerned, there are no showstopping bugs that I know of. A couple of notes on the *installation* of Pathagar, where we do have a bunch of problems: 1) The *current* version of Pathagar is borked. I haven't gone back to see where it fails or how, but there should be a prior version that works. There is also a version (patch) that apparently fixes the book edit and upload problem. I have not tested it. I hope someone else can take a look? https://github.com/PathagarBooks/pathagar/issues 2) There seem to be multiple deployment approaches. We have PIP, RPM, fabric, and the good old way of installing and configuring by hand (which is what I follow, because I haven't had the time to test the other methods). At the OLPC SF Summit, Jerry told me that they have the RPM part addressed, but the current bug (cannot add/edit books) gets in the way. Hopefully the latest patch can address these things. For your immediate purposes, I'd suggest `mkdir /var/www/html/ science` and put the pdfs there. Then clients can go to http://schoolserver/ science to download them. Anna On Sat, Nov 16, 2013 at 10:05 PM, Curt Thompson curtathomp...@gmail.com wrote: So I've been tinkering around XSCE School Server for a while now - I have it set up with Internet-in-a-box via USB drive and I spent a while trying to get my laptop to work as AP/server. I've also been poking around looking for basic setup info. In
