Forum OpenACS Development: Brief OpenACS4 installation guide

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Posted by Vinod Kurup on
I wrote up a *very* brief guide to installing OpenACS4 and I've placed it in file-storage. I've also uploaded my aolserver-config file, which I've edited so that it can easily be used for postgres or oracle.

Let me know if it is helpful, or if not, how I can fix that 😊

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Posted by Don Baccus on
Thanks for posting this, Vinod!  I'll take a closer look at it in a day or two.
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Posted by Dave Bauer on
The guide suggests installing PostgreSQL and Oracle on the same OpenACS system to be able to switch between them. This seems like a good idea to test porting efforts. Is it?
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Posted by Jonathan Marsden on

Not sure if this belongs here or as a comment in file-storage? I found the document useful but came across one issue it does not mention.

On my Red Hat 6.2 boxes which had libxml 1.8.6 installed already, nsxml linked against that, even when the libxml2 and libxml2-devel RPMs were installed also.

To fix this I had to explicitly link it against libxml2. Trivial makefile patch, but confusing until I realized what was happening!

The patch is just:

--- root.orig/nsxml_0/Makefile  Tue Oct 24 15:44:40 2000
+++ root/nsxml_0/Makefile       Wed Apr 18 18:59:39 2001
@@ -10,6 +10,7 @@
 #
 OBJS      =  ns_xml.o
 
-MODLIBS   = -lxml
+#MODLIBS   = -lxml
+MODLIBS   = -lxml2
 
 include  $(NSHOME)/include/Makefile.module


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Posted by Tom Jackson on

I mentioned that in https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=18890. Although I didn't offer a patch. Maybe the problem is, we didn't install libxml2 correctly? It is frustrating to waste an hour or two figuring out the problem and installing the correct software. Only the truly interested will take the time to do it.

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Posted by Vinod Kurup on
Thanks for the feedback - I added a note to the document. I had a similar problem on Debian, but I installed libxml2, removed libxml (and then ran ldconfig) and it compiled.
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Posted by Jonathan Marsden on

Tom Jackson wrote:

> It is frustrating to waste an hour or two figuring out the problem
> and installing the correct software. Only the truly interested will
> take the time to do it.

Right. I'm using what I have learned to build a set of binary RPMs... makes installing really really easy, on Red Hat 6.2 at least. Stay tuned... Vinod's doc helps but, as you say, there are still a lot of steps and gotchas.

I looking at this from the standpoint of starting without any form of OpenACS... so I can ignore the wrinkles of trying to run two versions of PG and two versions of OpenACS on the same machine at the same time.

Bear in mind, OpenACS 4 is definitely not a production working system at this point -- it is for experimenters who by definition do have some interest in it. Having said that, I think we can do a lot to minimize the installation pain of many or all of the pieces. I'm trying to do exactly that for Red Hat users... more info in a day or two, I hope. Maybe even later today.

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Posted by Arjun Sanyal on
Is this guide still at /file-storage? I can't seem to find it there.
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Posted by Vinod Kurup on
Hmm..when I uploaded the new version, it set the read perms to 'deny'. I've reset them to 'allow', so it should be visible again.
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Posted by Don Baccus on
I've noticed the same thing, Vinod - I'm hoping to find some time to look into this and other openacs.org website issues later in the week.  No promises, it is just a hope at the moment.

Note also that uploading a new file set perms so anyone can write  it.  That may just be an issue with a parameter setting.

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Posted by Jack Hung on
Seems like the guide is lost in the shuffling of the file-storage.
Anybody know where it is now.
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Posted by Vinod Kurup on
I've uploaded it to the new-file-storage module.
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Posted by Ryan Campbell on