Monthly Archives: March 2011

More on WebLive and the Software Center integration

As Michael mentioned on Friday we now have a pretty well working WebLive integration directly in Natty’s software-center.

All you need is qtnx to be installed and an up to date Software Center.
Edubuntu 11.04 will ship with qtnx installed by default. We want to test the feature with all Edubuntu users first to see how it scales and make sure everything is stable before we consider using it for Ubuntu.

Now, quite a few people have been wondering what’s currently available on WebLive.
The complete package list is available here: http://www.stgraber.org/download/weblive-list.html (generated using the WebLive API)

It’s basically all the packages you can find in Edubuntu 10.10, Edubuntu 11.04 and Ubuntu 11.04 as well as the top-30 from the Software Center.
So if you want a package to appear on WebLive, write a review in the Software-Center and rate it.

Edubuntu WebLive

I also would like to remember everyone that you can still get full desktop session by going at: http://www.edubuntu.org/weblive

If you want to point a friend who doesn’t have the new software center to a single-app session, you can use: http://www.edubuntu.org/weblive/app/gedit (by replacing gedit by anything that’s available on WebLive).

Enjoy !

Posted in Edubuntu, Planet Revolution-Linux, Planet Ubuntu, WebLive | 2 Comments

Introducing the WebLive API

After working on it for the last two weeks, I’m proud to finally announce the WebLive API.
As a reminder, WebLive is the name used for the daemon, Drupal plugin and scripts used to run http://www.edubuntu.org/weblive
Since last week, all the code is now available here: https://launchpad.net/weblive

The API is exported over JSON and example code is available in the branch called ltsp-cluster-agent-vmmanager in the client directory. When interfacing with python, it’s recommended to use the “weblive.py” module as it’ll be updated should the JSON API change or be extended in the near future.

Exported functions are:

  • create_user(serverid, username, fullname, password, session)
  • list_everything()
  • list_locales(serverid)
  • list_packages(serverid)
  • list_servers()

The following functions are exported over authenticated XML-RPC (for management):

  • delete_user(serverid, username)
  • set_disabled(serverid,status)
  • list_users(serverid,all=False)

The main weblive instance is available at https://weblive.stgraber.org/weblive/json and is the one used by Edubuntu.

The drupal-weblive branch contains the Drupal module which is now just a client to the JSON API.

The first use of that API after the Drupal module is Natty’s software-center which since last week ships with code to connect to WebLive.
If you use up to date Natty, you’ll need to install “qtnx” from universe and then start: software-center –with-weblive

All the packages available in WebLive will then have a “Test drive” button you can click to test that app remotely from a WebLive server.

WebLive integration in software-center

The software-center integration is experimental and will hopefully be improved by the time Natty is released. As Ubuntu doesn’t ship qtnx by default, WebLive won’t be visible in the default Ubuntu install, though it’ll be for Edubuntu.

Note: It can take up to a minute to connect to a server. There’s currently no user feedback during the connection process unless you watch the terminal from which you started the software center.

The current code requires your username and hostname to be ascii lowercase alpha characters only. I posted instructions as a comment to get the development branch that doesn’t have this restriction.

Posted in Edubuntu, LTSP, Planet Revolution-Linux, Planet Ubuntu, WebLive | Tagged | 12 Comments