I'm attempting to get 3.0 beta 2 running to evaluate. I've had a few difficulties, but have it up and running far enough to get to port 8080 and run the web installer, however the web installer will not advanced past step 3 for me. The last page before the loop says "Success" and "Database tables created", but then the "Next>>" button just goes back to "Now we're ready to create the database..." I note that no tables have yet been created in the database. And first of the raft of errors submitting step 3 sends to the web log appears to be a database lookup: install.pl: DBD::mysql::st execute failed: Table 'koha.language_subtag_registry' doesn't exist at /home/x/koha/lib/C4/Languages.pm line 178. I in the logs that installer.pl seems to be trying to do a large number of lookups (presumably for configuration options) at every step, even step 1... so perhaps this is a red herring, and these lookups are logged and supposted to fail gracefully until the tables/data gets created. Googling found me: http://lists.koha.org/pipermail/koha-cvs/2007-July/014261.html A checkin which states step 3 loops if <kohaversion> does not exist in xml a loop like I am experiencing will occur. And indeed there is no <kohaversion> in my koha-conf.xml ... but surely this is an old bug which would no longer apply, and why would my generated koha-conf.xml not have the tag if it was needed? Any ideas? Anyhow, for the record, if anyone is interested, I also wanted to share my experience up to this point. I'll try to be as brief as I can. I'm doing this on a FreeBSD 7.0 amd64 machine. Apache 2.2.8, perl 5.8.8, Zebra 2.0.28. I'm a fairly experienced sysadmin. I read the INSTALL file, and hence ran the perl Makefile.PL. I chose the local install option, seeing the install directory to ~/koha. No problems. I noted the long list of warnings about missing perl modules at the end, but fired up the browser to 8080 anyhow to see what would happen. The errors were strange in the web logs, and nothing at all printed via browser, and i haven't really used perl for nearly a decade ... but i started hacking away anyhow trying to get a meaningful error message. The error message I was getting was: Can't locate object method "preference" via package "C4::Context" at /home/x/koha/lib/C4/Context.pm line 30. Commented some stuff out in Context.pm which eventually at least started getting the perl error messages dumped to the browser, where I could see the real error message was: Can't locate CGI/Session.pm in @INC And so I realised I am indeed going to have to install all those missing perl modules before getting any further. Now, what modules to install again? I looked on the wiki and see the install instructions for all sorts of platforms, but all of those instructions seem rather specific lists of commands, and assume various distros have some modules already installed, etc. Anyhow, i decided to try install-CPAN.pl, which I'd noticed mentioned in the INSTALL text. Didn't work at all for me. I have no idea why. I wasn't too disappointed, and didn't try too hard with it, because I really didn't want to spam my test system with a hundreds of perl modules anyhow. But next i searched through the source code to find whatever was generating the list of warnings the Makefile.PL had given me. I found the list of modules in (but surprise!) Makefile.PL. I then fiddled with "perl -MCPAN" until i figured out how to install modules using it to ~/koha rather than the system. A few false starts there trying to automate the process with shell script and the list ripped from Makefile.PL, but eventually i got all the modules and dependencies installed under ~/koha/lib (and did a bunch of fiddling with the apache SetEnv to get all the @INC paths needed) and the :8080 web interface seemed to work okay at that point. Now i should mention, I chose Pg for database driver when asked in Makefile.PL. I had my trusty postgresql database set up and ready to go. It was only later that I read in the mailing list that reportedly postgresql support doesn't really work at all. )-: I had been excited to read that postgresql would be supported. Maybe the Makefile.PL should be more clear than just saying it's "experimental"? I had tried installing using it anyhow, to see what would happen. I made it to the step 3 loop described above. Wondering if it was postgresql that was the problem there, I scrounged up a MySQL 5.0 instance and set it up for koha. I went into ~/koha/etc/koha-conf.xml and changed the driver name and port. And I ended up on the step 3 loop again. That's my story. Points to perhaps take away if you got this far: - Might be nice if the web installer script, as a very first step, simply checked dependency problems and gave a simple error if it found them (there seems to be a check at step 2 actually, but if some dependencies are missing (CGI::Session!) one never gets that far.) - weird how the languages in the dropdown on step 1 are seemingly in random order. - might want to discourage more strongly the use of postgresql if indeed it really doesn't work at all. - might be nice if install-CPAN.pl (whatever it does) could install CPAN modules locally as I did manually. Possibly this would be the case with the the .cpan/CPAN/MyConfig.pm i ended up using? I don't know. - are there generic install instructions anywhere? Something like an organized complete list of dependencies. A simple SQL file to set up the database? koha-conf.xml config file reference, which instructions on which settings absolutely needed to get the thing to run? I'll probably eventually look through install.pl and see if i can figure out what's going on. But hopefully it doesn't come to that. Sorry, somewhat failed in trying to be brief. <-;