First, log in to the system. The Tulka Whiteboard administrator should explain you what is your personal login-name and password.
If no problem occurs a new window appears.
Now, you should do some action (change room, click on the whiteboard area, etc...) to clear the logo. We hope that the graphics user interface (GUI) is self-descriptive. There are some tools on the left side.
There is a simple chat on the bottom of the client window. Just write some text to the chat input area and all the participant will see it on their chat display. Also some server messages appears on the chat display (as can be seen on the picture above).
The right panel contains some other tools.
Click at the Abcdef button to launch the Write text window.
Here you can select the font you want to use. The demo text shows you how does your
selected font look like. Note that the fonts are heavily system dependent and they may look
different at the another system.
Once you have selected the font write a text to the text area. Then press the mouse button over the whiteboard and drag the mouse to position the text. Once you release the button text is placed at the whiteboard.
By default the text in text area vanishes once you place the text at the whiteboard (so you need not to erase it manually when you want to write another text there). If you want the text to stay there press the checkbox don't clear before you place the text at the whiteboard (this is useful when you want to write the same text several times at the whiteboard).
To select a colour just click on the colour
palette. Your actual selected colour is displayed under the pallet. When you click at the actual
colour square a colour selector widow appears. In this window you can choose a colour in RGB format.
Tulka Whiteboard supports more rooms. Every room contains a different chat and whiteboard.
So there can be more parallel presentations at one time. Not all rooms are accessible by everyone.
When you click on the room choicer pop-up menu appears. There you can choose a room you wish to
enter (note that only the rooms to which you have access are displayed).
In larger groups it is necessary to coordinate work and avoid many participants drawing at the same time (which could be pretty chaotic). To avoid this problems it is possible to lock the the whiteboard in order to obtain exclusive rights to draw on the whiteboard and send messages to the chat.
There are two possible modes of so-called moderation.
In non-moderated rooms, everybody can lock the whiteboard (and thus obtain exclusive write access to it). Only the who locked the whiteboard, the moderator and the teachers (for explanation of moderator and teacher roles see the section Server Installation and Configuration) can unlock it again.
In moderated rooms, nobody can draw on the whiteboard by default. Only the user who locked the whiteboard has permissions to draw on it. Only moderator and teachers can lock the whiteboard directly. The other users must ask the teachers or moderator for the permission to lock the whiteboard. It they press the Wait button they appear in the waiting list (visible by moderator and teachers). After that they have to wait until some teacher grants them right to use the whiteboard (user gets a message which inform him/her).
The lock button consists of an icon which inform about the current state and a text with possible command. The icons are following:
the user can draw on the whiteboard and use the chat
the user can not draw on the whiteboard nor use the chat
the user is in the waiting list
(meanwhile he/she can not draw on the whiteboard nor use the chat)
Press this button to display a new image to the whiteboard. When you press this button a new dialogue
appears which allows you to choose between all the images available at the server (how to upload
media to the server is described here). Just select an image and press OK to
display this image (any other graphics will be erased).
Press the Slides button to select the slideshow you want to present. It will launch a dialogue similar to the Select Image dialogue. Here select a slideshow by its name and press OK (like in the images case you can select only a Slideshow which was uploaded to the server). When you do this the first page of the slideshow is displayed at the whiteboard. Also the slideshow name and page list is displayed at the right toolbar.
For the navigation through the slideshow use the slideshow navigation buttons or click at the
pages list to select the page you want to display.
Standard Tulka Whiteboard scripts are optimised for the A4 page-size. All the pages are divided to the top and bottom part (A4 is to large to fit to the whiteboard). So when your Postscript document has two pages (1 and 2) Tulka Whiteboard will display four pages (1-a, 1-b, 2-a and 2-b).
When you press the Chat button Advanced chat will appear. You will probably need to wait until
the advanced chat downloads all the previous conversation (the advanced chat unlike the simple
shows you what have happened before you have logged in). Remember that the advanced chat must
synchronise its state whenever you change the room (so once you have launched it you should not
change the room to often).
The talk to choicer let you select the group you wish to talk to (there can see several groups such as all, teachers, students and so on). When you select a group (other than all) you will start to whisper and nobody else except this group will hear what you say. Note that not all participants are allowed to whisper in general. So the talk to choicer is not always displayed in the chat window.
The colour choicer let you to choose your colour for the chat communication. Not all the participants are allowed to change their colour. So the select colour choicer is not always displayed in the chat window.
The hide button hides the advanced chat window.
The two checkboxes show for who checkbox and show timestamps checkbox let you to
show/hide addition chat informations: who can see the message and when have the message appeared.
The function of these checkboxes can be seen when you compare this two chat window screenshots.
The show server messages checkbox lets you to show/hide messages from the server.
The client can display only images and slideshows which were uploaded to the server (in fact your client access these files via http). So if you want to display some file from your hard disk you need to upload it first. Not all administrator allow to upload files (you need to ask you Tulka Whiteboard administrator if it is your case).
For upload a file you need to fill a form which will be probably at the login page (ask you administrator if you have some problems).
To upload image press the Browse button. Your browser will let you to choose the image you want to upload. Note that only the gif, png and jpg (or jpeg) images are supported now (unfortunately png images are not correctly displayed by older browsers). Then press the upload document button to upload this image. Wait a moment and the server confirms upload (or show the error message in the case of some problems).
Upload of slideshows (presentations) works similar to the image upload. Tulka Whiteboard supports upload of ps, dvi, html and rtf files but not all of them must be supported by your server (ask your administrator again :-).
The special feature of slideshows is that you can choice the name of it. Just fill the slideshow name field before you upload it. When you let this field empty the filename will be takes as the slideshow name.
Supported platforms
The server is currently supported only on UNIX-like platforms (e.g. Linux). Tulka Whiteboard server is written in pure Java and therefore it should work on other platforms (Mac, Windows) as well. The cgi scripting (for media and archive support) and automated install support depends on UNIX conventions and portion to other platforms would be more difficult.
Requirements
For server you need working Java and web server (e.g. Apache) installation. In addition you need
Installation
Unpack the package. Run the install script as root.
# tar xfz TulkaWB-0.x.y.tgz # cd TulkaWB-0.x.y # ./installOn modern Linux systems it is probably OK to use the default values.
Editing the configure files
The configure files are located in the directory you have specified during install. It is /usr/lib/TulkaWB by default.
Structure of users file
Every line except the lines beginning with character # (which are threated as comments) describes one user. The structure of such a line is
<user name>:<user password>:<colour>:<groups>where
In addition there is a special user with user name * (star). Such a user is called "joker". Here * stands for any user name which is not listed in users file explicitly.
Structure of groups file
Every line except the lines beginning with character # (which are threated as comments) describes one group. The structure of such a line is
<group name>:<colour>:<sub-ordered groups>[:<parameters>]where
Structure of rooms file
Every line except the lines beginning with character # (which are threated as comments) describes one room. The structure of such a line is
<room name>:<moderator name>:<teachers group>[:<parameters>]where
The moderator user and the users belonging to teachers group has special Lock/Unlock rights (explained in Lock/Unlock section). If such a user enter a room where he/she has one of these special roles a new Waiting in: window pop-ups. Here he/she can allow the waiting users. In addition moderator can see all chat communication (including all whispered communication) and acts as if he/she belongs to all existing groups.
Starting and stopping the server
The server can be started (by default) by command
# tulkaserver the startstopped by the command
# tulkaserver stopand restarted by the command
# tulkaserver restartIn the case you do not use default setting replace the command tulkaserver by the command you have specified (don't forget to check that the script is in your $PATH and issue rehash command if you use csh or tcsh).
Server commands
Server commands are invoked from the command-line by
# tulkaserver[parameters]
Currently there is only one command reread_config exists. It is invoked from the command-line by
# tulkaserver reread_configIt rereads users, rooms and groups files. Please note two limitations:
This tool was developed by Michal Beneš and Tomaš Barta for the Internet Seminar organised by Tulka group. Further improvements were inspired by the needs of the course Applied Computational Linguistics.
This tool is still improving. As we do not want to spend all our time by cleaning the code (this really should be done :-) and implementing new features we encourage all developers over the World who find this tool useful to join us.
Tulka Whiteboard was released under LGPL. Latest distribution (incl. sources) can be found at http://giotto.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de/~mibe/tulka/TulkaWB.tgz, official web side is http://giotto.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de/~mibe/tulka/, official documentation (this file) http://giotto.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de/~mibe/tulka/doc.
