Assignments in LMS: How to cope with disk space issues

In this article, we'll talk about managing an LMS when all institutional assignments handed in by students have to be handed in through the LMS, and what that means if you have several thousand students. This case is based on one of our customers which provides in-class English courses to about 55,000 students in a monthly cycle. The institution started working with us in 2012, so it's already been 5 years since we've started developing their custom Chamilo LMS setup.

Chamilo 1.11 on Raspberry Pi 3 for off-the-grid situations

This article can be considered an update of our first article on installing Chamilo (on a Raspberry Pi B+). This time, we are testing it with Raspberry 3, as of the 1st of April 2017 (no joke intended). Last time, we were testing with Chamilo 1.9, which is arguably less load-intensive, considering it doesn't include any Symfony component, and it doesn't require any .htaccess configuration.

Change the URL of a Chamilo portal copy

There is a surprising number of cases where you'd want to change the URL of a Chamilo portal, but the more common we see is when you take a backup copy of a portal and want to use that copy to build a new test portal. Obviously, if you keep the same URL, you're going to have difficulties having them both running at the same time. Chamilo is not good at managing several URLs (although another article on this blog will help you do that), and even less good at managing a dynamic URL, so there are 3 necessary steps to change the URL (this is valid at least until version 1.11 of Chamilo).

Installation guide for Chamilo 1.10.x on Digital Ocean with PHP7

This guide will take you through the process of installing Chamilo 1.10 (from Github sources) for testing on a fresh Digital Ocean instance, on an Ubuntu 16.04 distribution. A previous article on this blog explains how to install Chamilo 1.9 using Juju Charms and another article explains how to install 1.10.2 on Ubuntu 15.10.

Odoo apps licensing

If you ever want to implement projects with Odoo and, like us, you are a bit itchy about non-free-software licenses and alternative BSD or LGPL-like licenses, you might want to know this. Odoo itself was previously (as OpenERP) AGPL, but it apparently (following David from Odoo S.A.

The complete guide to screencasting in Ubuntu 14.04 + Gnome Shell

For those developers of you wanting to do more than just develop under Linux, you'll have realized that there are many things stopping you for doing proper video tutorials as easily as you would do it with some non-free (as in freedom) software. Fear not, though, as this tutorial, written at a time between Ubuntu 14.04 and 14.10 with the Gnome Shell, will help you go through it and hopefully setup a perfect environment that you will be able to re-use anytime, anywhere (with your laptop).

YouTube requirements

In order to prepare a good video tutorial, the first thing you need is: stan

Using Chamilo juju charm to setup a dev environment on Digital Ocean

If you're in a hurry/on speed, know this:
  • this procedure is slightly more difficult (so longer) than installing the charm on Amazon
  • you can skip directly to "Installing Juju"
  • if you already have juju installed, you can skip to the last 2 lines of the "Installing juju" section
  • if you already have juju-docean installed and configured, you can skip directly to "Provisioning VMs"
  • otherwise, just continue reading, it's worth a few minutes...
This tutorial regroups a lot of advanced notions, so if you want to know more about one of the follo

Howto install OpenMeetings 2.2 server on a Debian Wheezy box

This guide is written specifically to cover a lack of quality documentation for the installation procedure of an OpenMeetings 2.2 server on a Debian Wheezy box. It will be based on the manual available already for this procedure (but relatively badly structured and written in a rather improvable English), by Alvaro Bustos with the help of Federico Christian Tomasczik. Thanks to both of them. My manual is mostly a rewrite of the information in their guide, hopefully with enough precision to allow someone to script it.