Experimenting on distant labs and labs on the Cloud

I have delivered a speech last week about some ideas and experiments I have about the use of remote access and Cloud technologies for labs. I have collected the speech recording and stuff, in french, in another post.

The presentation was in french originaly, so I’ve quickly translated my slides and recorded an english version.

I mention tools like Guacamole, MeshCentral, NRELab’s Antidote, Eclipse Che and Labtainers, as well as k8s and Docker, as interesting tools that may allow us to continue teaching in labs while allowing more flexibility, distant learning, and hopefully improved quality.

You can find the slides here: https://speakerdeck.com/oberger/experimenting-on-distant-labs-and-labs-on-the-cloud, and the recording is here:

Experimenting on distant labs and labs on the Cloud.

Expérimentations autour de TPs en distanciel, TPs sur le Cloud

J’ai participé au colloque IMT4ET de l’IMT, pour faire une courte présentation sur le thème des Travaux Pratiques à distance et des expérimentations sur les TP “virtuels” sur le Cloud sur lesquelles je travaille en ce moment.

Update: a version in english is also available.

J’y parle de Guacamole et MeshCentral, d’Antidote, de Eclipse Che et de Labtainers, les différents trucs excitants du moment, mais aussi de kubernetes, docker et de trucs louches comme du DevOps académique 😉

Les slides sont disponibles en ligne, et voici une vidéo ou j’expose mes idées sur la question :

Update : une version rédigée de mon propos est parue sur le site “Innovation pédagogique”, si vous préférez une version textuelle.

N’hésitez pas à me contacter si vous voulez creuser les sujets présentés, pour collaborer sur tous ces outils en logiciel libre.

Virtual Labs presentation at the HubLinked meeting in Dublin

We have participated to the HubLinked workshop in Dublin this week, where I delivered a presentation on some of our efforts on Virtual Labs, in the hope that this could be useful to the partners designing the “Global Labs” where students will experiment together for Software Engineering projects.

In this presentation (PDF) I introduced our partners to the Labtainers and Antidote Open Source projects, which are quite promising for designing “virtual labs” using VMs and/or containers.

Thomas and I have recorded the speech, and I’ve used obs and kdenlive to edit the recording.

Here’s the results (unfortunately, the sound is of low quality):

Feel free to comment, ask, etc.

Labtainers in a Web desktop through noVNC X11 proxy, full docker containers

Here’s another recording of a demo I’ve made of our efforts on running Labtainers with a Web desktop.

This time, we’re using a modified version of DoroWu’s noVNC X11 wrapper container (“docker-ubuntu-vnc-desktop“), to provide an X11 Display to labtainers.

I initially adapted DoroWu’s container image by using Debian instead of Ubuntu, but it appeared that noVNC 1.0.0 was a bit too old in the Debian package. So I switched back to the same version as the one DoroWu chose, and this time no more disconnections.

Also, we’re now rebuilding the Labtainer master container from upstream’s Git repo. Fresh Labs every day 😉

Continue reading “Labtainers in a Web desktop through noVNC X11 proxy, full docker containers”

Two demos of programming inside the Web browser with Theia for Java and PHP, using Docker

Theia is a Web IDE that can be used to offer a development environment displayed in a Web browser.

I’ve recorded 2 screencasts of running Theia inside Docker containers, to develop Java and PHP applications, respectively using Maven and Composer (the latter is a Symfony application).
Continue reading “Two demos of programming inside the Web browser with Theia for Java and PHP, using Docker”