Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to Newbee documentation

Collapse
Posted by Aernout Schmidt on
Q1 What do I need before I start?

A1 FreeBSD, PuTTY, iXplorer and some unix reading

read

Some of Philip Greenspun's work (e.g., this) and Calvo's article.

install

We assume you have two boxes available, one client (on some MSWindows OS) and one server (where FreeBSD-4.6.2, aolserver-3.4.2, postgresql-7.2.1, OACS4.x and dotLRN will live).

On your server you will need to install FreeBSD-4.6.2.

Get the file 4.6.2-disc.iso from the directory /pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/ISO-IMAGES/4.6.2 from your nearest freebsd ftp mirrorsite (mine is ftp.nl.freebsd.org) and burn it on a CD.

Use the CD to install FreeBSD-4.6.2. It will take approximately an hour to follow steps 1-54 of the installation guide available at http://www.orchardlabs.com/library/freebsd/freebsd.

readmore

If you are new to unix, you will want to keep the relevant freebsd handbook URL amongst your favourites. It will further help to read the man pages of the cd, pw, su, mkdir, cp, mv, rm, edit, chown, chmod, make, gmake, find, script and makefile commands/issues. The shell command "man find" will show the man pages of find on the FreeBSD console used.

install

On your Windows box, download and install PuTTY from http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/. You will use it to provide a virtual server console on your windows box.

experiment

Read the PuTTY documentation and try it out. You cannot login as root. Using PuTTY you can su to root when logged in as a user that is a member of the wheel group. As root, you can use the script command to log the keystrokes and the console action - a handy tool for reflection. If your server does not print, you can install and use iXplorer on your Windows box (download and install from http://www.i-tree.org/gpl/ixplorer.htm) to transfer files between your server and your client box.