user1092284's questions

What I'd like to do is be able to start external programs from links in a local website.

I've defined a custom protocol handler in firefox by setting the following variables in about:config

network.protocol-handler.external.myprotocol;true
network.protocol-handler.warn-external.myprotocol;true

This successfully causes firefox to open a 'launch application' dialog box when I click on a link in the form myprotocol:///path_to_program_I_want_to_run, and then I browse to the shell script I want to use and tell firefox to run it. Unfortunately the script doesn't seem to be run at all.

I've set the file permissions to 777 so firefox shouldn't have any trouble running it

The shell script originally only contained the line

$1

The idea being that the path of the link would be passed in as the first argument and would immediately be run as a program. This worked fine when I ran the script myself using commands like

#./run_program.sh gedit 

or

#./run_program.sh /home/ciaran/test_program

The script now for testing purposes contains only the line

echo "testing" > /testing/file.txt

where 'testing' is a directory with 777 permissions. Also note that /testing/ actually is located at the root of my filesystem (though i can't remember why i put it there!), so I haven't just gotten mixed up between relative and absolute paths

Again, this runs perfectly fine when I run it from the terminal, and file.txt is created in the right location. With firefox though, I am given the option to choose an application to run, I choose that shell script, and it doesn't seem to do anything. file.txt is not created at all, though there are no permission issues that I can see. So firefox just doesn't seem to be running the script.

I have also tried changing my about:config to contain

network.protocol-handler.expose.camara;true

and

network.protocol-handler.app.camara;path/to/shell/script

with no success

What I'm thinking about is basically a classification system, for use in classifying educational content such as videos, PDFs, wikipedia pages, and also local applications and linking it all to educational courses to make it easy to search for.

So say two schools are training people in different courses, but have the exact same broad range of educational content on their computers. The content in a big variety of forms. We would be able to define a simple outline of a maths course. Perhaps just by creating a set of tags or nested categories representing the different topics covered. Then we could classify any relevant content we have by linking it to the tags/categories. We could do the same for the other school's course.

A user would be able to browse and search through all the different content of every type from one interface. Allowing them to easily find learning or teaching materials. There would ideally be a fair amount of flexibility and overlap in the system. So if we say that one course is the maths section of a certain country's curriculum, then a user could find the content relating to it by browsing by country, then subject, then grade level (advanced/beginner) and then individual mathematical topic (depending how detailed the classifications are), but they could also browse first by grade level, then subject, and see all the maths content for every country.

It would also be great if content could be indexed and searched. And this would all have to be done locally.

Although I've mentioned courses and schools a lot, the software would basically just be classification and search/browsing, not course or curriculum management software.

Is there any software that would be able to build up this sort of structue? I'm sure something similar could be achieved through tools like sharepoint but this would be run on individual machines, not on a network so I'd like a ubuntu desktop app.

I have a feeling I'm missing something obvious here or just thinking about this in entirely the wrong way...

EDIT:

The machines are currently running edubuntu with some extra software and content added.

Also, if a tool for this does not exist, then development is a possibility. In fact, I'd rather like to take it on as a project for my final year in college, but I wanted to see if there's any existing software that could solve the problem first.

EDIT NUMBER 2:

Looking around a bit more I see more similarities between what I want and various tools like existing Enterprise Content Management Systems, Document Management Systems and also web CMS. All of them seem like fairly weighty options though and in the case of things like the document management systems I'm not sure how simple they can be made to use.

Do you think any of them would be flexible enough to give this level of classification and also have a really simple end-user interface. Of course it would still be much better to have a proper desktop application than running a webserver, database server and app on top, as these would be very low spec computers.

This would have to be usable by people with very low levels of computer literacy (third world deployments)

Okay, so I had a dual boot of Tango Studio (based on Ubuntu 10.04) and Windows XP.

Yesterday I downloaded the .iso for Ubuntu 11.10 and attempted to install from a USB (my BIOS won't normally boot from USB but I had PLOP boot manager on a CD). I booted up Ubuntu from the USB and then from there formatted the partition with Tango on and installed Ubuntu 11.10. On booting up I came into Grub rescue mode. So I booted up from the USB again and used boot-repair to reinstall Grub.

After this I would see the normal Grub menu, but on choosing Ubuntu I would come to a black screen. On choosing recovery mode it would begin starting normally with no obvious errors but instead of coming to a cli I would just get a blank screen with a flashing cursor on the top left, not accepting any input.

I have since reformatted and reinstalled from a CD rather than USB and had the exact same problem. I used boot-repair again and the result is the same. Output of the most recent boot-repair is at http://paste.ubuntu.com/869805/

I have also tried editing the ubuntu grub entry and replacing quiet with text nomodeset as I saw in an answer to another question. This got me a bit further - I saw the purple ubuntu loading screen but still came to a blank screen after that. Anyway, in most of the other questions in which that is brought up the user is still able to boot into recovery, while I am not.

Can anyone help? Thanks in advance, let me know if there's any more info I need to provide!

EDIT FOR MORE INFO:

I read something saying it's quiet splash that should be replaced with nomodeset. Earlier I had left splash in the line. So i tried it this way and it froze after displaying the following text:

fsck from util-linux 2.19.1
mountall: Plymouth command failed
mountall: Disconnected from Plymouth
/dev/sda5:clean, 139359/1741488 files, 745830/6961125 blocks

From a bit of googling it doesn't look like plymouth is essential, but I've checked and I do have the most current versions of mountall and plymouth installed so I don't know why there's a problem

EDIT FOR MORE INFO AGAIN:

I used dkpg --reconfigure plymouth cause I saw it mentioned in another forum and it still says plymouth command failed on boot

FOLLOW UP - JULY

Unfortunately I was not able to get this working. I needed it working and switched distribution before anyone commented or answered this question, so am unable to try out any suggestions posted here

I'm thinking of giving this another go sometime soon, if I do then I'll report back.