Forum OpenACS Q&A: OpenACS on Windows 95/98?

Posted by Gregory McMullan on 05/16/00 02:28 AM

If I wanted to be able to do light development/testing of an OpenACS
system on a Windows box, can anyone see any reason that I shouldn't be
able to compile AOLserver and Postgres with CygWin (the Cygnus tools
for making it easy to port most unix stuff to Win32)? Yes, I promise
to document what I did when I do this crazy thing, so that we can keep
the options open.

As to why I would want to do this, it is looking like I will be
acquiring a lovely Sony Vaio for doing some Windows development and
consulting, and it occurs to me that it might be simpler to do the
work under Windows rather than dual boot it (which I will almost
certainly set up anyway, since I won't want to be completely bereft of
a real OS). It might even be amusing to see what kind of performance
it can deliver, to be able to show people how open OpenACS can be.

2: Response to OpenACS on Windows 95/98? (response to 1)

Posted by Li-fan Chen on 05/16/00 03:16 AM

Have fun. Good luck. 😊

3: Response to OpenACS on Windows 95/98? (response to 1)

Posted by Gregory McMullan on 05/16/00 04:03 AM

Ahh, following up your own questions is always fun. I noted a thread on photo.net talking about running ACS Classic on Windows 2000 at http://photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=000spp&topic_id=web%2fdb&topic=

The discussion points to http://dev.arsdigita.com/doc/win2k-installation.html, which says that it is doable, but not recommended for production use.

4: Response to OpenACS on Windows 95/98? (response to 1)

Posted by Nathan Reeves on 06/12/00 06:15 PM

The only thing that might set you out of the running would be getting Postgres running under windows. Probably no problem if you've got the bits to compile it yourself, and if anyone has a compiled copy and would like to post it to somewhere I'd be extremely grateful.

Oh, the postgres driver as well. Not sure if its compiled for Win32 in the aolserver dist yet.

Cheers

5: Response to OpenACS on Windows 95/98? (response to 1)

Posted by Peter Vessenes on 06/12/00 08:53 PM

I'm pretty interested in this, too. Any way we can fruitfully collaborate?

6: Response to OpenACS on Windows 95/98? (response to 1)

Posted by Roberto Mello on 06/12/00 09:14 PM

From the PostgreSQL Administrators Guide (list of supported platforms):

Windows/Win32 x86 v7.0 2000-04-02 Client-side libraries or ODBC/JDBC. No server-side. Magnus Hagander

WinNT/Cygwin x86 v7.0 2000-03-30 Uses Cygwin library. Daniel Horak

So I guess PostgreSQL server will only run on NT. You can try VMWare or FreeMWare or something.

7: Response to OpenACS on Windows 95/98? (response to 1)

Posted by Peter Vessenes on 07/26/00 09:49 PM

Okay,

I'm trying to get the postgres driver compiled on win2k, using cygwin. Here's where I'm at -- I can make postgres.o no problem, but when I'm trying to create postgres.so, gcc refs libpq.so, which never got made when I did the postgres compile. (I have lipq.a, but no libpq.so). Can anyone explain to me what I'll need to do to compile the postgres shared library? (Even in unix would be a start). My C compilation skills are limited to getting nethack running on Irix in the early '90s, so I'm feeling in a bit over my head.

BTW, Don, are you monitoring this thread? If not, I'll forward this as an e-mail to you.

8: Response to OpenACS on Windows 95/98? (response to 1)

Posted by David Richards on 07/27/00 12:23 AM

Peter,

I just went over the Postgres install package. I'm not sure that I know what libpg.so is used for, but I know that when I used the configure script, I did not add a parameter to build it. (I identified each configure parameter I used, and the files they created.) So, that leaves me with the assumption that libpg.so is the main library, or part of the core package that is built on every compile.

This assumption is further supported in that I've compiled the postgres driver 5 or 6 times in the last 48 hours. I have gotten that same error 3 of those times. (I don't learn from my mistakes). Each time, my paths were not all set correctly. i.e. if you can find libpg.so anywhere on your whole system, make sure you're postgres driver makefile can see it. I believe it should be pointed to with PBLIBS, but I could be mistaken on that.

I hope that's useful. Let me know how it goes. If you don't have that fixed by this evening, I'll recompile Postgres to try and find some new ideas for you. I've got to install it on a new machine anyway. (I won't get home until about midnight MDT, so if you need help, you've got until then to get frustrated/find answers).

9: Response to OpenACS on Windows 95/98? (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 07/27/00 02:00 AM

Peter - on Linux, the standard makefile for Postgres builds the client library, libpq.so. The environment variable PGLIB needs to point to this when you run psql - the first thing you should do to make sure everything's built correctly and your environment's set up correctly.

Did you do a "make install" after "make"? "make install" copies stuff to their home.

You'll need to edit the Makefile that comes with AOLserver to make certain that it references the correct directory, too. And lastly, the account that runs AOLserver needs to have PGLIB, etc set up correctly.

I've not used cygwin, so I can't help you out with any wrinkles this throws into the mix. I know PG and AOLserver both work with it, though - or so folks say.

If you have a large development machine around you can buy VMware for $299 and run Linux on a virtual machine running under NT, getting rid of any cygwin problems. VMware rocks - I've got it running on my laptop (with Win98 running virtual on my Linux machine) and it is very convenient.

10: Response to OpenACS on Windows 95/98? (response to 1)

Posted by Peter Vessenes on 07/27/00 07:29 PM

Thanks for your responses. The problems go a bit deeper than the suggestions, I think.

One of the problems is that the current gcc in cygwin doesn't allow the creation of shared libraries. I'm also trying to compile the postgres driver for aolserver in the cygwin environment, but the AOLServer I have is precompiled for Windows directly, so the environments aren't matching up. (Can't link in the right library files from AOLServer, etc.)

This leaves me asking: does anyone have a working postgres driver for Windows 2000 and AOLServer? I'll post another thread along these lines.

Thanks again

11: Response to OpenACS on Windows 95/98? (response to 1)

Posted by Polawat Ouilapan on 10/16/01 09:02 AM

I got Postgres, AOLServer, and OpenACS to work on Windows 98 following the instruction from here.

I do have a problem though. After about 5 minutes, AOLServer hung (not Windows). I'm not sure whether it's postgres or AOLServer. If I kill both processes, I can get it up again without restarting Windows, but it keeps hanging. Anyone have the same experience?

12: Response to OpenACS on Windows 95/98? (response to 1)

Posted by Yon Derek on 10/16/01 09:15 AM

I've made the guide you mention and I've also compiled the AOLServer in question. I've been experiencing hangs as well. I didn't investigate it deeply (at all, really) but I would say this is AOLServer's fault. It's based on a beta version of upcoming (?) version 4 of AOLServer which probably hasn't been tested by anyone too much and as such is likely to be not very robust. I fixed a couple of bugs but there are probably more. If you find a win distro of 3.x version of AOLServer, you might try it instead.

Certainly don't try to run production servers on this code, it's fine for testing and development.