New version of iTalc

[Andy B]

[needs-packaging] italc-client, italc-master, libitalc

"iTALC is a use- and powerful didactical tool for teachers. It lets you view and control other computers in your network in several ways." But newest version is 2.0 (in repos 1.0) and those versions aren't compatibile so I can't connect Windows 7 (because 1.0 doesn't work) and Ubuntu (I can't compile it mysefl :()

URL: http://italc.sourceforge.net/
License: GPL
Notes: Now there is 1.0.13 in repos, wish you can compile 2.0 and add in repo.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Stéphane Graber (stgraber)]

In the past I cared for iTalc in Ubuntu, investing considerable time working on wrappers, integration with LTSP and contributing to the upstream code. For 12.04 Edubuntu will no longer ship iTalc as it's been a pain to work with over the past few years.

Instead we'll be replacing it with Epoptes (Linux only so won't quite work for you) and will stop maintaining iTalc outside of security bugfixes for existing version of Edubuntu.

I just had a quick look at the state of iTalc in Debian and we're still in sync with them as they don't seem to have italc2 in their repository. Once they do, I'm happy to drop all my changes on Ubuntu's iTalc and import the package from Debian.

This means I won't take the time to package iTalc 2 myself but am happy to have it imported from Debian.
I highly suggest filing a similar bug report against Debian.

Thanks

[steelsteel (dokkodo-san)]

Hello out there!

I am affected of this "bug" too.
I did try to compile italc2 several times by myself - but failed.
I did contact the italc2 developer but got no sincere answer about when there will be an ubuntu package.
Sad matter.

Epoptes looks good, i will try it for an alternative - but i would prefer an italc2 Ubuntu package.

Greetz

[Antoine RODRIGUEZ (antoiner-l)]

After a great push up of epoptes, the development of epoptes seem to have stuck since last month. there is no code update since then ...

Having two choices is better than having one.... Even more when both projects are so unstable in a matter of development and bug fix.

up for having italc2 package under debian/ubuntu

[Alkis Georgopoulos (alkisg)]

> After a great push up of epoptes, the development of epoptes seem to have stuck since last month. there is no code update since then ...

We (the epoptes developers) align our efforts with Ubuntu LTS versions.
When the 0.5.3 version was released (the one shipped with Ubuntu 12.04), there were no bugs at all in the bug tracker page (https://bugs.launchpad.net/epoptes), we had fixed all of them after months of user feedback. And the few new ones since then are mostly small feature requests. It's a rather stable version with more features than iTalc and which should suffice until the next big round of code updates in epoptes.

We now work full time on LTSP (http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ltsp-upstream/ltsp/ltsp-trunk/changes), mostly to make it possible for an LTSP server to function without a chroot at all, making its maintenance much, much easier for schools and for cases where no specialized sysadmin is available,
and on a user management tool for schools, because we found noone that matches our needs (mass user creation, import/export from .csv, shared folder creation...). Those 2 tools are currently needed by schools a lot more than the few newly requested epoptes features.

In the end of this summer those tools will be finished, and we'll shift our focus on epoptes once more. Major features (not even requested in the bug tracker) that we'll try to address is multicasting (which should speed up screen broadcasting more than 10 times), using libvncserver + libvncclient instead of using external VNC programs, epoptes-client reconnections etc, see the roadmap page.

So no, there's no need to worry about epoptes being unmaintained in the next ...couple of decades, as the main page says we use it ourselves daily so we'll only consider dropping support for it if another tool emerges that does more than epoptes does (and is well maintained etc etc).

> Having two choices is better than having one... up for having italc2 package under debian/ubuntu

I totally agree with that part. :)

[Ryan Tandy (rtandy)]

Marking fixed as iTALC 2 is included in Trusty and later, synced from Debian.