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1: LAMS 2.1 Release Candidate 1 out!
03/14/08 07:09 AM
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Laaadddiiies and Gentelmen,

We are happy to announce that we have reached probably the last step just before the final stable release for LAMS 2.1... we present you:

LAMS 2.1 Release Candidate 1!

This almost stable release has significant improvements from the Beta Release (out since December 2007). The key improvements are:

  • Tons of branching improvements. As you can see in the new branching tutorials, we have taken the input from teachers and change out interface to make them much more intuitive. In addition, now in LAMS you can have:
    • Branching within branching, so N number of branching within branching making possible to support unlimited ways of teaching
    • Unlimited combination of optional sequences, branching and optional activities. All combination of options are now allowed, so if you want to design excellent adaptive sequences for all your students, well, now you can :-)

If you haven't seen this, James has done some presentations lately where he highlights the many different ways you can use branching in everyday teaching. Also:

  • A new great feature: A Flashless learner interface, so you can use LAMS on mobile devices that might not support Abobe Flash. Or if you prefer to use a simpler interface, why not using this instead (although it is simpler, it has all the might of the Flash interface too!)
  • A newer version of the online editor in which you can now add video or audio to any LAMS Activity
  • Export portfolio now includes all images and pictures uploaded by teachers
  • Lots of new documentation
  • Help pages now in your own languages, with the latest introduction of more than 20 help wikis
  • and many many more...

This release is now available for download as an easy installer for Windows and Unix systems. Since this is not yet a full stable release, we advice not to use it in production environments. Not necessarily because it can't support large number of users (we've been conducting tests with over 350 concurrent users on a single machine and it's been fine) but because there might be usability bugs that we haven't yet found.

If you want to have a play with this, use our demo site as it has just been upgraded to LAMS 2.1 RC1.

Given the testing we've been giving to this version, we feel fairly confident that a final 2.1 stable release is coming out very shortly. But it's very important to have as much feedback and comments as possible to found bugs and improve interfaces. So please let us know anything you think it can help us improve it.

And as always, many thanks to all the translators for their work in making LAMS available now in 25 languages!

Enjoy!

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

2: Re: LAMS 2.1 Release Candidate 1 out!
In response to 1 03/20/08 06:01 AM
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I tried this on Solaris 10. I am moderately competent in sysadmin and did manage. Had to make a few minor fixes to the shell scripts.

1) Scripts fail because the following construct does not work with the bourne shell:
export JAVA_HOME="/usr/java"
Maye you should rewrite them this way:
JAVA_HOME="/usr/java"
export JAVA_HOME

or else make them bash shells (probably the default on linux and this is why linux installs work), i.e. add as line one
#!/usr/bin/bash

2) Then in install-lams.sh there was cp solaris doesn't understand
# cp -rv assembly/lams.ear ${DEFAULT_DIR}/deploy
cp -r assembly/lams.ear ${DEFAULT_DIR}/deploy

3) Finally the JAVA_OPTS in ./run-lams.sh do not go to run.sh. Since I am quite clueless about scripts I don't know why. To safe time, I just used the JBOSS run.sh and fixed line 141:
JAVA_OPTS="-Xms512m -Xmx512m -Dprogram.name=$PROGNAME"
#JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -Dprogram.name=$PROGNAME"

Details are here, but don't take my writing for gospel or anyhing... I am not a programmer nor a sysadmin...

http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/LAMS_installation_and_configuration

PS: I'll go over this wiki page and add some more stuff as I will continue playing with lams 2.1

Posted by Daniel Schneider

3: Re: Re: LAMS 2.1 Release Candidate 1 out!
In response to 2 03/25/08 05:08 PM
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Hi Daniel,

Thankyou for your suggestions, these modifications will be added to the installer for 2.1 so people can easily install on solaris. You wiki page looks quite helpful.

Luke

Posted by Luke Foxton

4: Re: Re: Re: LAMS 2.1 Release Candidate 1 out!
In response to 3 03/25/08 08:21 PM
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Luke,

It would be great it you could add a link in the Linux installer page to Daniel's wiki as well?

Thanks,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

5: Re: Re: Re: Re: LAMS 2.1 Release Candidate 1 out!
In response to 4 03/25/08 08:40 PM
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Yep, no worries.

A link has been put on the http://wiki.lamsfoundation.org/display/lamsdocs/Unix+Installer+Help page

Posted by Luke Foxton

6: Re: LAMS 2.1 Release Candidate 1 out! - File import
In response to 1 04/23/08 06:55 AM
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Did you add a human readable error message for failed LAMS file import ? Maybe you also should even go a step further and say things like:
- this is a corrupt zip file
- this is a LAMS/LD zip and that we can't read currently
- this is a zip file that comes from another planet ....

My case was a student exporting a sequence to IMS LD in a local PC install and then trying to import it on our server via Moodle.

In LAMS 2.1 RC1, we got this kind of JAVA trace (only 2 lines shown). Easy to understand for me, but typical teachers won't.

at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.MasterSlaveWorkerThread.run(MasterSlaveWorkerThread.java:112)
      at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:595)
Caused by: org.lamsfoundation.lams.learningdesign.service.ImportToolContentException: java.io.FileNotFoundException:  /var/tmp/lamszip_1208937581768_lamstmp_1208937580241__uploaded_learningdesignrenard_exo13_imsld/learning_design.xml (No such file or directory)
      at org.lamsfoundation.lams.learningdesign.service.ExportToolContentService.importLearningDesignV2(ExportToolContentService.java:1080)
      at org.lamsfoundation.lams.learningdesign.service.ExportToolContentService.importLearningDesign(ExportToolContentService.java:931)
      ... 51 more
Caused by: java.io.FileNotFoundException: /var/tmp/lamszip_1208937581768_lamstmp_1208937580241__uploaded_learningdesignrenard_exo13_imsld/learning_design.xml (No such file or directory)
      at java.io.FileInputStream.open(Native Method)

Posted by Daniel Schneider

7: Re: Re: LAMS 2.1 Release Candidate 1 out! - File import
In response to 6 04/28/08 12:49 AM
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Is this enough? It merely restates what was on the previous screen but at least it hides the exception.

I've also improved the message on the previous screen so it explicitly says you can't use the IMS LD format.

Fiona

Posted by Fiona Malikoff

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