Is there a reason you used the debian packages? As far as I know, Vincent is still working on them and none of the documentation in the distribution or on the site recommends them. It will be great when they are ready, but they are still under development. The INSTALL and INSTALL.debian files detail more reliable steps of installation through other means. The most reliable way to install and keep the system updated is to use git to manage the codebase. --Joe Atzberger On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 11:32 AM, Mahesh T. Pai <paivakil@gmail.com> wrote:
First, I am not subscribed, So any questions should be cc'ed to me. And apologies for cross posting - I cannot figure out which list this should be sent to.
I got the system at around 6 PM last Saturday, and finished the job today (11th) morning - around 11 AM. OS install + Koha configuration took a mere 5 days. The OS installation was a battle, which ended only on Tuesday morning. I will not bother the list with details. Suffice it to say that the fault certainly was not Debian's. My ISP was corrupting the .iso files I was downloading. :-( The OS was Debian Sid/Unstable amd64 on a Intel D processor. That is all I needed to know about the hardware. Pristine install using debootstrap, and other packages added after rebooting from that install.
Koha debian packages came from git.debian.org, (see the comments on http://blog.bigballofwax.co.nz/2008/08/05/koha-3-packaging/)
"deb http://apt.workbuffer.org/ intrepid all"
Is the line I had to add to /etc/apt/sources.lst.
The packaging was buggy, but they got the dependencies right. Every dependency was fixed properly.
The .debs failed to create sub directories under /etc/koha/ - a serious problem. I had to create the directories manually, and then do a "dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archive/koha-<whatever>.deb" manually.
Easy, eh?? It took me 3 days to sort out problems reaching the koha web-install page.
I had the following lines in /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 localhost library 127.0.0.2 librarian.koha 127.0.0.3 catalog.koha.
"Catalog" is easier to remember than "OPAC", right?
Since it was intended to be a stand alone system, I was tempted to leave out port 8080 part in apache2 configuration, but decided that the people who use it (there is a strong community of librarians here who are well aware of koha) may get confused with absence of 8080 in the URL.
All the problems have been already reported on this (or -devel) lists, and googling was quick to give answers. But that it took 3 days means there were several problems.
First was failure of the install scripts to put the table's names, user name, and password into the /etc/koha/koha-config.xml file.
And there is some directive in koha-config.xml which put the "method to access the database as "sql". It ought to have been "mysql". Once this was sorted out, the catalog page would load, saying that the server is down for maintenance. But the web install refused to come up, complaining of some fatal error.
This meant I had to manually install CGI::session from the tarball on cpan, as already mentioned in one of the lists. CGI::session I manually installed was same as the version in Debian. Guess this should go int INSTALL.debian file. Except the database configuration, I guess everything else in that file could be handled by debian installer, IMHO.
Rounded off the install with a simple index page in /var/www/ with links to http://librarian.koha:8080 and http://catalog.koha.
Further problems with the debian packages (snd some with koha itself).
1. Cid not create the cron jobs. (I did not realise it, till after I handed over the system. What are the consequences?)
2. I guess Debian packages does not create the appropriate files in /etc/init.d/ for the idzebra daemon. The koha-zebraqueue--ctl.sh is invoking the "daemon" binary, but debian uses start-stop-daemon binary. Hope things will run. I installed koha-idzebra-server package; not the koha-basic one.
The work around was to NOT specify to use zebra for indexing.
3. What is the difference between marc21 and unimarc? Librarians would know it; but not poor souls like me, who would be doing the software installation. A description of both in the web installer would help; I chose marc21.
4. What happens if I abort the webinstaller? Some clues on the web installer pages would be nice.
BTW, I did this free as in "free beer" for a friend of mine, at a law school with a mere 5K volumes. ;-) And I will write about the OS install elsewhere.
-- Mahesh T. Pai || http://paivakil.blogspot.com REVOLUTION, n. An abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.