Blackboard hates Linux

posey · n00b Joined: 15 Dec 2007 Posts: 16

Blackboard refuses to allow Linux to work with it. The Blackboard Academic Suite/Learning system thing that colleges seem to like. Everything seems fine until you try to upload a file. It tells you to "Please enter a valid file" and refuses to accept/acknowledge any file you try to give it. User agent switcher doesn't help at all.

I, being in love with my Gentoo desktop, find this upsetting.

It works just fine on Mac, and presumably on Windows, so why does it not play nice with Linux?

I complained to the support people. They were not interested and ignored most of what I said. They told me to buy Word for Mac (I told them I was trying to upload a .doc and that it had worked on OS X), threw the supported software list at me, and marked it as resolved.

I can't see why it wouldn't work, even though its not officially supported.

For the record, its a 64bit box, but I have both 32 and 64bit versions of Firefox. And its mostly updated. It does have the Java browser plug-in.

frostschutz · Advocate Joined: 22 Feb 2005 Posts: 2175 Location: Germany

Know of any open example site where we could test this?

posey · n00b Joined: 15 Dec 2007 Posts: 16

No, sorry. That would be good though.

Theres a preview thing you can use without having an account, but I'm pretty sure all you can do is look at course syllabuses and assignments with it, not upload files.

There's a preview button at the bottom of this page that lets you see the preview thing: https://dist-ed.waketech.edu/webapps/login/

This seems to be the site where they sell it from, and has the supported software information.
http://www.blackboard.com/products/Academic_Suite/index

mark_alec · Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 5:05 am Post subject:

Moved from Gentoo Chat to Off the Wall.

Works for me (on the University of Melbourne's Blackboard system) under Konqueror on an x86 Gentoo box.
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dmitchell · Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 5:15 am Post subject:

I used it without difficulty a few years back; in fact I had it working transparently with kioslaves.
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Zepp · Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 5:46 am Post subject:

Never heard of it.

jdmulloy · Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 5:50 am Post subject:

I'm a student at Northeastern University and I've never had a problem with it with Konqueror. I'm only on a 32-bit system but I think it's just you, unless they have some very new version. From what I've seen it's just a standard http upload supported by just about every browser.
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slycordinator · Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 6:01 am Post subject:

I used it with no problems at 2 different schools.

barophobia · Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 8:46 am Post subject:

Probably thinks you are trying to upload a "illegal" (aka a virus) file and stopped you from doing anything bad. You can complain all you want but in the end of the day, they will throw you the list of compatible software and Gentoo will never be on it.

Anyways blackboard never gave me trouble but then again I never had to upload MS Word documents. It gets even annoying when the school forces you to pay for the blackboard service.

Things you are assumed to have in college:
1) mac or windows machine
2) if you are cs major random versions of MS Visual Studio (to get around stupid file compatibility problems)
3) MS Excel/Word/Powerpoint
4) IE7
5) PDF writer
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antonlacon · Apprentice Joined: 27 Jun 2004 Posts: 223

Depends on the school.

The University of Washington runs its own Blackboard-like software, Catalyst, e-mail through Alpine, and provide shell access to the student servers. Documents from professors are typically PDFs.

xerxian · Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 10:30 am Post subject:

It has always worked for me, in failfox, ompera and konqueror.
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mdeininger · Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 11:49 am Post subject:

there used to be some issues with file uploading forms in firefox back in the days. i remember that from phpmyadmin upload forms for sql files. just try opera or konqueror.

you can't really break a web app for a specific OS unless you really do it on purpose... and /then/ the useragent switcher would've worked

.

tylerwylie · Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 11:54 am Post subject:

chrismcdirty · Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 12:24 pm Post subject:

Zepp · Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 1:13 pm Post subject:

chrismcdirty · Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 2:16 pm Post subject:

Zepp · Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 3:42 pm Post subject:

atrus123 · Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 4:43 pm Post subject:

Blackboard is pretty evil. A quick glance through their license will explain as much.

When my wife was teaching an online class using Blackboard, we had to use wine+IE6 to make everything work properly.
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Etal · Veteran Joined: 15 Jul 2005 Posts: 1467

Clete2 · Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 7:02 pm Post subject:

Blackboard is working just fine here. I can upload files easily.
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StarDragon · Guru Joined: 19 Jun 2005 Posts: 390 Location: tEXas

My God! You have succesfully brought back school nightmares of using that POS application. I really hope I never have to deal with it again.

mdeininger · Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 8:45 pm Post subject:

atrus123 · Posted: Tue Mar 11, 2008 8:51 pm Post subject:

frostschutz · Advocate Joined: 22 Feb 2005 Posts: 2175 Location: Germany

posey · n00b Joined: 15 Dec 2007 Posts: 16

I was excited to get out of high school because I thought I'd never have to use blackboard again. Little did I know.

My school is trying to gradually move from campus cruiser to some blackboard/microsoft combined solution. I think my school maintains their own servers, or they at least pretend to.
The campus cruiser people are good; I told them their webpage wouldn't render at all on a sparc and they fixed it within the week. I don't know if they were part of the college or their own thing though. So, I'm mostly annoyed at the response I got from the college (it was their support people - and my mac is a g3 so even if I wanted it to, word for mac won't work, yay for making up a different problem to "fix").

I rebuilt this box about a month ago, just to switch from 32bit to 64bit. I didn't try uploading files before that, but taking tests worked then and still works now. I really have no idea why I can't upload files. The file format doesn't matter at all. I turned off flash blocker and ad block plus, doesn't seem to be either of them. User agent switcher got installed after I discovered a problem.