- Koha - lists.katipo.co.nz

Questions about using Koha in our primary school
by georgejenner＠belgacom.net 15 Jul '02

15 Jul '02

Hello there I'm going to start with one long message. I've been through the archives and need to talk to you all. My child's primary school has been split into two campuses, and we've lost the library entirely. And there is no budget for a new library for several years. Open source and freeware look even better when you have no money :-) So some parents have volunteered to make a library. A computer has been donated, and the collection will be started from donated books. The committee have also received good advice from another local school : be very wary of parents offering help with computers. That's me :-) The main question is one you must receive frequently. Does platform independence really include Windows? The computer has been purchased and I assume it came with Win XP (I haven't seen it yet). I don't think I could convince them to use Linux, even if I had a clue about it myself. In any case, I want to test out and demonstrate Koha using my laptop which runs Win ME. I see from the installation notes that it has been installed on NT and Win 2000 with considerable difficulty. Can you tell me how difficult? I have no knowledge of perl or Apache. Does that make it pointless trying without years of study? The next question is about languages. The OPAC at our school would be presented in at least 5 European languages, including Greek. The school has 5 language sections, plus Irish, but all other languages in the European Union would be represented in the book collection. So would a multilingual OPAC be difficult to produce? There would possibly be some benefit to Koha from this, and perhaps this could be our contribution to the cause: translations of key documents into all these languages. Next question. The library will be staffed by volunteer parents with less computer knowledge than even me. There won't be a trained librarian for at least 3 years. Would this present a problem? Is the system sufficiently simple and robust that we can't get into much trouble? Next question. As the collection will be started with donated books, we need to catalog them. There is a shareware proggy that purports to take an ISBN and then search the internet for the book, then places the biblio dat in a database. It's called Readerware. It says it even gets the cover art and includes that. I think that having cover art would be really nifty for a primary school library. So could the OPAC show that. Is this simply a question of having an image in a field of a MySQL database. And is that possible? I'll stop there. If you can give me good news I'll start downloading. I've got a couple of months to get it going as the school year starts in September in Europe. As if things weren't weird enough. Thanks for any help George

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Re: Your password!
by mabarlotti＠racine.ra.it 15 Jul '02

15 Jul '02

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Installation
by Martin Kinyua 13 Jul '02

13 Jul '02

Has anyone out there installed KOHA onto windows 98/2000 etc ? Please let me know. Where can I get the installation instructions Martin

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(13)Permission denied
by Larry Currie 12 Jul '02

12 Jul '02

Hi. I've just gotten past the initial stumbling blocks of setting up version 1.2.1, including finding my Apache error log file, and now I get a critical "error (13) permission denied: make_sock: could not bind to port 198" when I attempt to follow a borrower card number link from the URL http://198.31.79.73:8081/cgi-bin/koha/member.pl after performing a member search. Can someone clue me in on what might be going wrong? Larry Currie -- Lawrence W. Currie User Services Librarian California Academy of Sciences Golden Gate Park San Francisco, CA 94118 lcurrie(a)calacademy.org (415) 750-7108 (415) 750-7106 fax http://www.calacademy.org/research/library/

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From the Kaitiaki
by Pat Eyler 12 Jul '02

12 Jul '02

12 July, 2002 To the Koha community; Bonjour, Our first French translation did in fact come out last week, which sets the stage nicely for this weeks news. We've also seen continued growth of our developer and user bases (including an installation of FreeBSD -- Hooray!!) A continuing issue has been the verification and installation of all needed Perl modules for Koha. We've discussed different approaches to solving it, and it basically comes down to two approaches: 1) we could write all of our own functions and ignore existing Perl modules. This would allow us sidestep the problem entirely. The downside is that the modules are very well designed, and very well tested -- failing to use them takes more of our development time to duplicate their functionality *and* it introduces bugs that we would not ordinarily have to deal with. 2) we could use the modules and create a 'bundle' to use for installing them. This would allow us to leverage the work done by the module writers while still preserving a fairly simple installation method. It will require one of the developers to step up to maintaining the bundle itself though. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter. This is one of those cases where I think the users have a much better idea of what 'the right thing to do is', so please give it some thought and let us know. 1.2 With 1.2.1 out and in use Chris, Steve, and the other developers have wasted no time. If anything they've pick up the pace. There is already a release candidate for 1.2.2 (mostly bug fixes and small improvements). We've also seen early glimpses of 1.2.3 which features a templated version of the OPAC functionality. Our 1.2.3 release will be a big deal for Koha. Templates allow us to begin the process of translating the application. This opens Koha to a whole new world of users. Translations Nicholas has spearheaded the effort to organize the translation efforts. He's started a mailing list for translators (http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/koha-translate<> for details). He's also laid out some ground rules for translation (<http://www.saas.nsw.edu.au/wiki/index.php?page=TranslationTeams> and <http://lists.katipo.co.nz/public/koha/2002/000858.html> for details. If you'd like to see Koha to your native language, please get involved. Community More work has been going on in the larger community. Some of this work is now becoming visible at <http://www.callimachus.org>, which is an umbrella group for coordinating the efforts of people working on free software for libraries. Some initial joint projects are being bandied about and I think things will start to break loose fairly soon. I'd like to thank everyone for putting up with my disappearing act over the last couple of weeks. I'm currently in the midst of a job transition, which is impacting just about everything else as well. If you're still waiting on me to do something for you, I might require a gentle reminder (and/or a bit of patience). Merci, -pate Pat Eyler Kaitiaki of the Koha Project

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Waiting for user manual: newspaper, publication, ...
by Marco Gaiarin 11 Jul '02

11 Jul '02

Ok, koha works, i've learned how to insert books and i suppose how to insert other things like CD, videos, ... But for newspaper/magazines and periodical publication in general?! My little background on library management knows that there's ISSN number, but i've not understood if i can insert one record (we are subscribed to this publication), a record for every issue, or a more fine-grained article level. EG, the keyword will take care of the publication in general, or the specific argument of the issue?! Explain me, please. Thanks. -- dott. Marco Gaiarin GNUPG Key ID: 240A3D66 Associazione ``La Nostra Famiglia'' http://www.sv.lnf.it/ Polo FVG - Via della Bontà, 7 - 33078 - San Vito al Tagliamento (PN) gaio(at)sv.lnf.it tel +39-0434-842711 fax +39-0434-842797 Supporta il disegno di legge sul software libero! http://www.softwarelibero.it/news/news020417_01.shtml

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Translators
by Nicholas Rosasco 10 Jul '02

10 Jul '02

Translator volunteers.... Since people are starting to ask me for copies of the documentation for translation purposes.... We now have a list for just translation issues https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/koha-translate has information for subscribing to the list. What will be going across that list is: Docs for translation (mainly the From the K. information) Management info * Where to submit translations * Rules of thumb * new version announcements re doc.s My thought at the moment is that before Koha will "officially" support (ie, list a translation of either documentation or application) a language I'd like to see at least two active translators listed on: http://www.saas.nsw.edu.au/wiki/index.php?page=TranslationTeams At least one participant should able to cope with the technical language of librarians and UNIX installation. Please be aware if you are consenting to volunteer that you will, most likely, be asked to help the developer and support volunteers translate questions and comments as well. This is not likely to be a one time job. Eventually, those languages that are officially supported will have website space at <country code>.koha.org... currently, the only language/nation to have that status is France (fr). Those languages that continue to be supported will keep those sites, those that aren't will be turned off until the two-active-person rule is met. I, and the other Koha project members, care sufficiently for the user communities and reputation of open source in general enough to not want anyone stuck with an application they can only upgrade to a new version in the wrong language. I know this sounds mean, but the alternative for them would be much much worse. Regards Nick Rosasco documentation (and, apparently, translations) guru, Koha

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Installed! ;) Now some question...
by Marco Gaiarin 09 Jul '02

09 Jul '02

I've installed koha 1.2.1 without big problems. But i've some question. 1) 've to do in cgi-bin dirs (koha and opac): ln -s . koha to make all the system works. The URL looks like: http://opac.sv.lnf.it/cgi-bin/koha/search.pl It is normal?! Why not mention this in docs?! 2) http://koha.sv.lnf.it/cgi-bin/koha/admin/marctagstructure.pl Not Found The requested URL /cgi-bin/koha/admin/marctagstructure.pl was not found on this server. Apache/1.3.26 Server at koha.sv.lnf.it Port 80 ...and really there's no marctagstructure.pl file anyware. 3) I'm not a librarian, so could be some missed background, but some aspect are for me not totally clear. Particulary the acquisition/budget/book funds schema. Again, i've inserted two test book (one, ``Computer Networks'' of Tanenbaum, linus sorry me ;) with only the minimal data. Now i wont to edit these, adding some keyword, but i came to ``biblio record'' editing (all field empty) and not to these fields. 4) Where i can get the sgml source of the manual, or at least the .pdf or postcript for pretty print?! 5) I need a quick translation at least of the OPAC module to make usable here (waiting for 1.4 to a real translation). Where i can start?! How i can translate to minimize headache for the next 1.2.X release?! 6) Where i can modify the link for ``OPAC'' and ``Library website'' in homepage and top/bottom of the page?! I think my user have no interest to get a book in new zeland... ;-))) Ok, for now it suffices. ;) -- dott. Marco Gaiarin GNUPG Key ID: 240A3D66 Associazione ``La Nostra Famiglia'' http://www.sv.lnf.it/ Polo FVG - Via della Bontà, 7 - 33078 - San Vito al Tagliamento (PN) gaio(at)sv.lnf.it tel +39-0434-842711 fax +39-0434-842797 Supporta il disegno di legge sul software libero! http://www.softwarelibero.it/news/news020417_01.shtml

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Bug-Report itemtypes.pl
by Dorian Meid 09 Jul '02

09 Jul '02

Hi, don't know if this is the right place to post bug reports but here's a minor one. It doesn't affect functionality. in file: cgi-bin/koha/admin/itemtypes.pl line: 123 is: _alertString += "- loan length is not a number\\n"; should be: _alertString += "- Rental charge is not a number\\n"; Dorian

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error with 1.2.1
by Ville Huhtala 09 Jul '02

09 Jul '02

Hello, I have some problems with searching. Why is it using /root/tmp ? from opac-error_log DBD::mysql::st execute failed: Can't create/write to file '/root/tmp/#sql10ab_c5_0.MYI' (Errcode: 13) at /var/www/html/koha/intranet/modules/C4/Search.pm line 707, <KC> line 9. DBD::mysql::st fetchrow_hashref failed: fetch() without execute() at /var/www/html/koha/intranet/modules/C4/Search.pm line 711, <KC> line 9. Ville Huhtala

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