Forum Problems Installing LAMS: LAMS 2.0 glitches


 
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1: LAMS 2.0 glitches
09/03/06 07:20 AM
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Hello,
I just installed LAMS 2.0 and it works just fine. However I noticed that it is not as polished as http://translations.lamsfoundation.org , is that by design or is there something wrong? The login page is just black text on a white background!! Also, some of the links like "My profile" display a window with the text "Under Construction", but on the translation server it works fine.
I also couldn't find any settings to change the language of the installation, where is that done?
I got LAMS 2.0 from the download available on http://wiki.lamsfoundation.org/display/lams/Building+LAMS

Thank you in advance

Posted by Al-Faisal El-Dajani

2: Re: LAMS 2.0 glitches
In response to 1 09/03/06 10:36 AM
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Hi Faisal,

I believe you might be compiling the source from the tarball, is that right?

If so, then you are using LAMS v2.0 beta as it was release at the beginning of July. Since then, we have been working on it everyday and all the latest improvements are on CVS (which is some sort of file versioning system that makes distributed development easier).

The translators server uses the latest LAMS code directly from CVS. If you are familiar with CVS checkouts, just follow the instructions and you should be able to get the exact same version as the translators site.

If you aren't really familiar with CVS, let us know and we'll help you out :-)

> I also couldn't find any settings to change the language
> of the installation, where is that done?

You should be able to modify your lams.xml file and select the language you want the server to run on:

        <DictionaryDates>
               <Dictionary>
                        <language>en_AU</language>
                       <createDate>2006-01-02</createDate>
               </Dictionary>
       </DictionaryDates>

Replace the en_AU for ar_JO if you want Arabic (Jordan) or es_ES for Spanish (Spain), etc.. and restart LAMS and it should start in that language.

It's also worth mentioning, that although you have set your site language to be Arabic, you can set users to have another default language. So even if your site is running in Arabic, you can set up students or teachers to use a different language. So when they login, although they will see the login page in Arabic, they will see all the pages in the system in Spanish.

This is usuful when you have language departments where they want their students only to experience the interface in a particular language.

Hope that helps,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

3: Re: LAMS 2.0 glitches
In response to 1 09/03/06 10:02 PM
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Sorry to disagree but that's actually not the right entry. The  entry Ernie mentioned is designed to tell Flash when to update its dictionary.

The two entries you need to change are:

<ServerLanguage>en_AU</ServerLanguage>
<ServerPageDirection>LTR</ServerPageDirection>

The server language is as Ernie described, so es_ES or or ar_JO.

The ServerPageDirection is a new entry added just now and will be used to control whether the page is written left to right or right to left. So for most languages it will be set to LTR, but for right to left languages it will be RTL.

So for Arabic, it should be

<ServerLanguage>ar_JO</ServerLanguage>
<ServerPageDirection>RTL</ServerPageDirection>

The point Ernie made about "you can set users to have another default language" is very important.

Once you change the language in the lams.xml you need to restart LAMS (if it was already running). Once LAMS has started, go to your browser and go to http://<servername>:8080/lams and you should see the index page in the new language. You may need to refresh the page twice before the language changes (don't know why twice - our code seems to do the same thing the first and second times!).

The "Latest News & Updates" bits will still be in English as they are updated separately.

When you log in as one of our test users (test1, test2, etc) or as sysadmin it will go back to English. Why? Because those users are set up to use English. But if you login as sysadmin and go to the Groups Management screens, go to Manager Users and then Create New User, you will see it defaults to the your selected server language.

I've actually been working on the left to right / right to left stuff over the weekend, so if you check out from cvs from today, the login page and the noticeboard tool should come out at RTL if Arabic is selected. This change is yet to be tested properly, and won't be working on the translation server till next Friday.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Fiona

Posted by Fiona Malikoff

4: Re: Re: LAMS 2.0 glitches
In response to 3 09/03/06 11:58 PM
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Fiona, you are absolutely right. My mistake!

 <ServerLanguage>es_ES</ServerLanguage> is the one to change

Sorry about that.

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

5: Re: LAMS 2.0 glitches
In response to 1 09/05/06 05:16 AM
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Thank you Ernie and Fiona for your prompt response. I checked out LAMS 2.0 from CVS and it looks much prettier now :).

Two questions:
1) Network users still get the previous "ugly" interface, why is that happneing? On my machine i get the new polished interface but network users don't.
2) I modified the server language parameter. Now when i refresh the login page twice i get an arabic interface, but no other page appears in arabic. How can i fix that?

Thank you for your cooperation

Posted by Al-Faisal El-Dajani

6: Re: LAMS 2.0 glitches
In response to 1 09/05/06 04:50 PM
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> Two questions:
> 1) Network users still get the previous "ugly" interface, why is that happneing? On my machine i get the new polished interface but network users don't.

I don't have an answer to the first question (why the network users still get the "ugly" interface). It sounds like you have ended up with two copies of LAMS on the one server. Try the following:
* With JBoss stopped, delete contents of {jboss-4.0.2}\server\default\tmp and {jboss-4.0.2}\server\default\work. JBoss must be stopped when you do this. Occasionally the server pages seem to get "stuck" in the JBoss page cache.
* Check the server address that they are using the access LAMS. I assume you are using http://localhost:8080/lams/ and they are using something like http://192.168.1.37:8080/lams/. If you use the address the network users use, do you get the old or new interfaces?

I'll see if I can think of anything else.

> 2) I modified the server language parameter. Now when i refresh the login page twice i get an arabic interface, but no other page appears in arabic. How can i fix that?

Refreshing the login page twice - I yet to work out why you have to do that. It is odd.

The language for the user is stored on in the user's record. So if you log in as test1 through to test3, you will get English. On the version of LAMS running on the translation server, the "arabic" user is set up to use the ar_JO locale, and so on the translation server when you log in as "arabic" you see Arabic. We do all of the language accounts on the translation server that way.

To change the language of a user ( e.g. test1 ):

* Log in as sysadmin (password sysadmin).
* Select the Group Management link (top right hand corner).
* Under the "Playpen" entry, select the Manage Users link.
* This will bring up a list of all the users installed when you build LAMS.
* Find the account you want to change and click Edit.
* A long page with all the user's details will appear. Change the locale to Arabic then click Save.
* Close all the LAMS popup windows and log out of LAMS.
* Login to LAMS as the user (e.g. test1). You should now see most, if not all, pages in Arabic.

These screens will also allow you to set up new users.

The Group Management pages are not translated yet, so if you change the sysadmin's language to Arabic, you will still get English on the Group Management pages. These pages have to be reworked to make them more user friendly so we won't ask people to translate them until after we have reworked the screens.

On Monday (Australian time) I checked in some of the code to do the right to left implementation for Arabic. I think you have checked out since then so you should have this new code. If you want to check that you have the new code, then go to the lams_common project and have a look at the file src/java/org/lamsfoundation/lams/web/filter/LocaleFilter.java. It should have an entry "LocaleFilter.java,v 1.16" just underneath the copyright statement. If you have v1.16 of the LocaleFilter file, then you have the right to left implementation. If you have v1.15 then you will need to check out and rebuild again.

We are using the syntax <html lang="ar-JO" dir="RTL"> to do the right to left implementation for Arabic. I have implemented this for the login page and the main LAMS page, and the noticeboard tool ONLY.

Before I implement it in the other parts of the system, we are hoping that you could review the pages and let us know if it is coming out correctly. In particular, if you look at the noticeboard tool in authoring and in learning and then email me with any problems/criticisms/improvements we could make in the page. The noticeboard tool is the tool that looks like an easel with the words "HTML" on it. I have attached a few screen dumps to show you the screens I am talking about.

We would appreciate any feedback that you could give us. I repeat - only the login page, the main LAMS page and the noticeboard tool has been done in right to left. The rest of the system is still left to right. But I want to make sure I have it right in noticeboard first before we apply it to the rest of the system.

We know about the following problems with the pages:

* The page headings overlap with the LAMS logo on the right hand side of the pages.
* The toolbars in the HTML editor have changed to right to left but the text inside the editor is still left to right.

At the moment, all the default text in the tools is in English. e.g. "Welcome to these activities." We have a plan for how sites can change the default text to whatever they want but we haven't had time to do it yet.

By the way, this right to left support won't appear on the version of LAMS on the translation server until Friday, as we only update that server once a week.

Regards,

Fiona

Posted by Fiona Malikoff

Attachments:
8: Re: Re: LAMS 2.0 glitches
In response to 6 09/06/06 05:32 AM
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Hello Fiona,
Ok, the ugly interface problem got solved. Apparently it was my mistake. In lamx.xml i had the server URL set to localhost:8080/lams... when i switched that to 192.168.1.11:8080/lams and rebuilt LAMS it worked fine.

I modified one of the users to have an arabic locale and i am currently testing the arabic interface and RTL support.

Everything works now, i'll just do more testing for the RTL support and report back to you. Should i post it here? this is installation problems forum, so i don't know if it would be appropriate. Would posting in LAMS for Tech-Heads forum be better?

One last thing, having to check LAMS from CVS and build it more than once appeared to be something not very enjoyable, so i wrote a simple script to do it for me. It's ugly but it gets the job done. I'm attaching it in case you could improve it and then post it so it might help somebody with the installation.

Thank you for your support :)

Posted by Al-Faisal El-Dajani

Attachments:
9: Re: Re: Re: LAMS 2.0 glitches
In response to 8 09/06/06 05:58 AM
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Hi Faisal,

Thanks for the script, it's great. I like all the seds so you don't have copy files around and stuff.

One suggestion for your script, instead of all the:

cvs co lams_admin
cvs co lams_build
cvs co lams_central
cvs co lams_common
cvs co lams_contentrepository
cvs co lams_learning
cvs co lams_monitoring
cvs co lams_tool_chat
cvs co lams_tool_forum

You can just go

cvs co all

and that will get all the packages you need to build LAMS.

> Apparently it was my mistake. In lamx.xml i had the server
> URL set to localhost:8080/lams... when i switched that to
> 192.168.1.11:8080/lams and rebuilt LAMS it worked fine.



One important thing to notice for the record on this one is that you must give people the URL to access LAMS as you put it in the lams.xml file. Otherwise there are some sessions that might be lost when jumping from application to application (LAMS is a collection of webapps) and you will all the sudden get sent to the login page without any apparent reason.

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

10: Re: Re: Re: Re: LAMS 2.0 glitches
In response to 9 09/06/06 06:25 AM
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Hey Ernie,

AARGGHHH, if only i knew about that co all option before.. but then again, maybe i wouldn't have been so inclined to write that script :)

Thanx for the heads up, and hope you find some use for it

Posted by Al-Faisal El-Dajani

7: Re: LAMS 2.0 glitches
In response to 1 09/05/06 04:52 PM
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The second attachment for the previous posting.

Posted by Fiona Malikoff

Attachments:
11: Re: LAMS 2.0 glitches
In response to 1 09/06/06 07:07 PM
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Faisal,

>Everything works now, i'll just do more testing for the RTL
>support and report back to you. Should i post it here? this
>is installation problems forum, so i don't know if it would
>be appropriate. Would posting in LAMS for Tech-Heads forum be
>better?

You can post here, or you can just email me directly. Try fmalikoff@melcoe.mq.edu.au and if that doesn't work stitchoz@yahoo.com.au should get to me.

We had some dns issues last week and I'm hoping that is why Ken couldn't email me then.

When I get your comments, I'll add them to our issue tracking system (https://bugs.lamsfoundation.org/) and I'll let you know the reference numbers so you can monitor their progress if you wish!

Fiona

Posted by Fiona Malikoff

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