Internationalization, part five: documentation and release!

LTSP Manager has just been announced in the ltsp-discuss mailing list! After long hours of testing and fixing issues that were related to the internationalization process, it’s now time to make it available to a broader audience. It’s currently available for Ubuntu and Debian via a PPA, and it will shortly get uploaded to Debian experimental.

We’ve documented all the necessary steps to install and maintain LTSP using LTSP Manager in the LTSP wiki: http://wiki.ltsp.org/wiki/Ltsp-manager. The initial documentation is deliberately concise so that new users can read all of it. We’ve also included best practices about user account management in schools etc.

This concludes all the tasks outlined by my Outreachy project, but of course not my involvement to LTSP Manager. I’ll keep using it in my schools and be an active part of its ecosystem. Many thanks to Debian Outreachy and to my mentors for the opportunity to work on this excellent project!

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Internationalization, part four: localization

Now, I am working in the fourth part of my Outreachy project which is the localization of the just-internationalized LTSP Manager software. Specifically, I am translating every message of the application’s GUI from English to Greek (the reverse task from part 1), using the “Translations” environment of Launchpad, that my mentors pointed out to me. I am writing this post from Montreal, where I have traveled in order to attend the 18th DebConf and present my Outreachy project to the Debian community. My mentor and I are giving a joined presentation titled: LTSP Manager: how 1000+ Greek schools switched to Debian-based distributions.

Last but not least, I would like to mention that today, tο my great surprise,  when I logged in to the launchpad translating environment, I saw that a Czech translation to the LTSP Manager software had started!  The internationalization of the LTSP Manager software progresses well: it is already available in English and very soon in Greek and Czech!

Internationalization, part three

The first builds of the LTSP Manager were uploaded and ready for testing. Testing involves installing or purging the ltsp-manager package, along with its dependencies, and using its GUI to configure LTSP, create users, groups, shared folders etc. Obviously, those tasks are better done on a clean system. And the question that emerges is: how can we start from a clean state, without having to reinstall the operating system each time?

My mentors pointed me to an answer for that: VirtualBox snapshots. VirtualBox is a virtualization application (others are KVM or VMware) that allows users to install an operating system like Debian in a contained environment inside their host operating system. It comes with an easy to use GUI, and supports snapshots, which are points in time where we mark the guest operating system state, and can revert to that state later on.

So I started by installing Debian Stretch with the MATE desktop environment in VirtualBox, and I took a snapshot immediately after the installation. Now whenever I want to test LTSP Manager, I revert to that snapshot, and that way I have a clean system where I can properly check the installation procedure and all of its features!

Internationalization, part two

Now that sch-scripts has been renamed to ltsp-manager and translated to English, it was time to set up a proper project site for it in launchpad: http://www.launchpad.net/ltsp-manager

The following subpages were created for LTSP Manager there:

• Code: a review of all the project code, which currently only includes the master git repository.
• Bugs: a tracker where bugs can be reported. I already filed a few bugs there!
• Translations: translators will use this to localize LTSP Manager to their languages. It’s not quite ready yet.
• Answers: a place to ask the LTSP Manager developers for anything regarding the project.

We currently have an initial version of LTSP Manager running in Debian Stretch; although more testing and more bug reports will be needed before we start the localization phase. Attaching a first screenshot!

 

Internationalization, part one

The first part of internationalizing a Greek application, is, of course, translating all the Greek text to English. I already knew how to open a user interface (.ui) file with Glade and how to translate/save it from there, and mail the result to the developers.

If only it was that simple! I learned that the code of most open source software is kept on version control systems, which fortunately are a bit similar to Wikis, which I was familiar with, so I didn’t have a lot of trouble understanding the concepts. Thanks to a very brief git crash course from my mentors, I was able to quickly start translating, committing, and even pushing back the updated files.

The other tricky part was internationalizing the python source code. There Glade couldn’t be used, a text editor like Pluma was needed. And the messages were part of the source code, so I had to be extra careful not to break the syntax. The English text then needed to be wrapped around _(), which does the gettext call which dynamically translates the messages into the user language.

All this was very educative, but now that the first part of the internationalization, i.e. the Greek-to-English translations, are over, I think I’ll take some time to read more about the tools that I used!

Outreachy internship!

Hello everyone! I am very happy that I have been accepted as an intern in the Outreachy 2017 round. My project task is to adapt sch-scripts into a new project “ltsp-manager”, primarily through internationalization and localization as well as documentation.

Sch-scripts is a graphical tool that assists with management of a classroom computer lab, managing users and network booted computers with LTSP, and is used in more than 1000 schools in Greece along with the epoptes user monitoring software.

Traditionally, maintaining an LTSP environment requires comfort with a commandline interface, but sch-scripts provides a graphical tool that simplifies the installation, configuration and management of an LTSP classroom.

Epoptes allows the teacher to monitor or assist users in the computer lab, as well as send messages, boot and shut down computers.

Both LTSP and Epoptes are present in Debian, and internationalizing sch-scripts is an important step towards making the same interface used successfully in Greek schools available to all Debian and Ubuntu users.