Upgrading from CAPA

If you have been running "classic" CAPA and would like to upgrade to LON-CAPA ... well, there really is no upgrade: CAPA and LON-CAPA are different systems, and you might be best served by installing a fresh operating system and the latest version of LON-CAPA from scratch.

Also, LON-CAPA needs significantly more computing power than CAPA, so a new piece of hardware might also be needed.

However, you might want to transfer your CAPA problem libraries between the systems. If your library mainly consists of textbook problems or problem libraries from MSU, FSU, Ohio U, SC, or ELPS, you likely don't need to bother, since those have been translated already and are available in the LON-CAPA network.

If you have your own problems, here's a way to translate them between the systems:

We would suggest to first learn about LON-CAPA by creating and editing some problems in LON-CAPA to get a sense of how it works - we did hopefully improve things and make things easier in the change.

That being said the conversion programs can be gotten here:

http://install.loncapa.org/versions/CAPA-converter.tar.gz

You'll need to compile the included program, this should just require running the command

make

in the CAPA-converter directory.

After running make, there should be a Linux directory and the program convert in there.

Running

./convert -f capa_file > converted_file.problem

should convert a single CAPA source file into a mostly valid LON-CAPA problem. You will need to at least add <problem> the top, and </problem> at the bottom.

Oftentimes you have entire libraries of resources. Included in the tarball is the subdirectory

conversion_wrapper

which has a script that automates the process of running convert on each file and is doing some post conversion items (adding in the needed
<problem> tags, etc.) It has an associated README that is fairly complete.

Please let us know how we can assist in the conversion.