Linux.com

Nice article on Fl_TeacherTool, although I would have liked to see more discussion of what Fl_TeacherTool does. I would like to see a version of Fl_TeacherTool which is designed for more general usage outside academic settings. For instance, Fl_TeacherTool could be a very useful tool for a network admin monitoring the uses of clients in a business setting. It wouldn' t take many changes to the code--just changing some of the labels on buttons and rewriting the documentation to make it a more general tool. Sadly, I don' t see many people outside the academic world using LTSP thin client networks and part of the reason is that many of the LTSP tools and the distributions which include LTSP (like K12LTSP, Edubuntu, Skolelinux) are only geared toward educational uses--but all those tools and distributions could easily be regeared for more general uses. I would like to see a distribution called bizLTSP or networkLinux which incorporates LTSP and tools like Fl_TeacherTool in a way which appeals to people other than teachers in schools.

As a side note, I should mention that I just sent Robert Arkiletian some code changes to internationalize Fl_TeacherTool with gettext support so it can be used in languages other than English. I also translated Fl_TeacherTool in Spanish and Portuguese, if anyone needs to use it in those languages. Unfortunately, FLTK currently does not support UTF-8, so international letters with diacritical marks are displayed as gibberish. Since many people now are installing UTF-8 as the only supported character set on their computers, Fl_TeacherTool doesn' t display the Spanish and Portuguese translations correctly on these computers. Hopefully the next version of FLTK will include UTF-8 support and solve these problems.
--Amos Batto

#