Latest Smarter Balanced Secure Browsers

Posted by ubermix On Friday, January 15, 2016 0 comments
For those of you in CA looking for the latest CAASPP Secure Browser version 8.1 for State testing in California, it available for easy installation from the ubermix repository. The repositories for both ubermix 1.x and ubermix 2.x are both up-to-date as of last fall.

The secure browser is used to administer the Smarter Balanced formative and summative assessments to all students in grades 3-8 and 11 throughout the State of California, and is quite a pain to install according to the "official" instructions, so having it as part of the ubermix ecosystem makes it significantly easier for schools and districts in CA to deploy.

Installation Instructions

The CAASPP Secure Browser and its dependencies are well over 50 megabytes, so if your school is starved for bandwidth, you may want to plan accordingly.

GUI Method:
  1. Click on Activities, then select Synaptic Package Manager under Administration.
  2. When the Synaptic Package Manager window appears, click on the Reload button to update the package list for all of the online software repositories.
  3. Once the reload is complete, use the Quick filter box to search for "secure-browser-ca" for standard ubermix 2.x or "secure-browser-ca-32" for 2.xL(ite) and 1.x. Once it appears on the list, click on the checkbox next to it and choose Mark for Installation.
  4. Click on the Apply button, and Synaptic will download and install everything you need.
  5. The CASecureBrowser icon should appear under Internet in the Activities menu. If it doesn't appear immediately, don't panic - it will after a restart.
Terminal Method:
  1. Press ctrl-alt-t to open a terminal
  2. Type  sudo apt-get update to update the package list for all of the online software repositories.
  3. Type sudo apt-get install secure-browser-ca on standard ubermix 2.x or sudo apt-get install secure-browser-ca-32 on ubermix 2.xL(ite) or 1.x to install the browser.
  4. The CASecureBrowser icon should appear under Internet in the Activities menu. If it doesn't appear immediately, don't panic - it will after a restart.
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