Questions about anything and everything
Shown below are frequently asked questions others have about LON-CAPA installation and system management. For a more complete FAQ, you are strongly encouraged to visit
FAQ
1. What is TtH and how do I know I have it?
2. So I think I'm done with the LON-CAPA installation. Now what do I do? How do I begin?
3. Why do I have to worry about choosing a "role"?
4. What kind of computer and operating will this work on?
4a. Will this work on BSD Unix?
4b. Will this work on Mac OS X?
5. What does LON-CAPA stand for?
6. Who wrote this code?
7. Where is this software being used?
8. What are current plans for the installation?
9. How do I upgrade?
10. What are RPMs?
11. How do I know this will be a secure solution for my users?
12. How do I contribute code?
13. Is LON-CAPA owned by any umbrella company?
14. What are the costs?
15. What kind of computer do I need?
16. Where can I learn more about the technical ideas surrounding the LON-CAPA project?
17. How are you similar or different to WebCT, Blackboard, etc?
TtH = TeX-to-HTML. You should have a file called tth.so on your system. If you do not have it, then you should download and install the binary http://install.lon-capa.org/3.1/binaries/tth.so into your /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.???/ directory.
You will first need to set up a domain coordinator on your machine. See loncapa/doc/how_to_domain_coordinator.txt in your CVS repository checkout. After this, it is time to play with the interface. We do not yet have a user manual, but Felicia is helping answer questions related to the LON-CAPA web interface.
A critical feature of the LON-CAPA interface is the idea that a user must select a role before doing anything further inside the educational system.
The operating system LON-CAPA runs on is the Linux operating system. LON-CAPA relies on an Intel-based architecture.
For full-time, classroom usage, an adequate LON-CAPA server should be/have:
A lesser machine can be used for toying around with LON-CAPA (LON-CAPA will run for a single user on most any machine).
LON-CAPA servers experience significant peaks of activity before a homework submission deadline. To support these critical peaks of activity, it is strongly advised that LON-CAPA machines fit the above recommendation.
If thousands of students start accessing the box as a web server... well you may want to consider more options. The design of the LON-CAPA system is to naturally and transparently load-balance on multiple computer clusters. So, a simple solution for running an entire college campus is to just have an adequate plurality of LON-CAPA servers rather than a single, particularly monstrous server.
We like to think of high web server usage as "a good problem" though.. :)
No.
No.
The Learning Online Network with Computer-Assisted Personalized Approach.
An eclectic variant is: Look! Our New Car Answers Pizza Appetites.
Or something.
This code was originally written by a group of staff and graduate assistants at Michigan State University. We are now receiving software contributions from several other universities. The technical design behind the project was constructed by Gerd Kortemeyer.
We have been able to run LON-CAPA on RedHat 6.2, 7.1, 7.2, Debian, and Mandrake.
You must use CVS over the network. Please click on the upgrade button at the top of this web page.
Software packages that are (usually) very easy to install. RPM stands for RedHat Packaging Manager software package.
LON-CAPA is distributed without warranty as described in the license.
We do think our security strategy is fairly robust. Important communications are encrypted and the server-client validation is instantiated in such a way as to prevent any remotely conceivable kind of spoofing.
Send a diff to lon-capa-dev@mail.lon-capa.org. It helps if you give it context with the -C option. For example,
diff -u -C3 doc/build/faq.html doc/build/faq.html~ | mail lon-capa-dev@mail.lon-capa.org
No and hopefully never. That's not what we're about.
Time & Money. You and/or somebody else needs the time to learn how to use the LON-CAPA system. You and/or somebody else needs the money to set up and maintain a working computer server(s) for your institution.
More importantly, if your institution wants a sound future and a increased ability to configure the LON-CAPA software, we recommend that you assume some responsibility for contributing code to the freeware project.
You need a RedHat 6.2-7.2 Intel-compatible computer. We do not currently support the SPARC and SGI hardware architectures.
You will find the technical manual to be very handy; please visit http://www.lon-capa.org/technical.html.
I would suggest two major differences: