Forum OpenACS Q&A: Problems Installing OpenACS on Redhat 9

I am trying out OpenACS for the first time, and having a little trouble getting it running on my RH9 server.

I have followed the installation documentation closely, but I ran into snags with the final openACS install.

I have installed Postgres from the Redhat 9 RPM (version 7.3.2) and tested it successfully.  I have also installed AOLServer (AOLserver 3.3oacs1) and tested it successfully according to the suggestion in the documentation.

I tried installing OpenACS both from the script and the tarball.  After the tarball install, I get:

command "ns_db" is not enabled
    while executing
"ns_db pools"
    (procedure "db_bootstrap_set_db_type" line 61)
    invoked from within
"db_bootstrap_set_db_type database_problem"

when I try to connect to the server.

In aol's log error.log, I get:

Warning: modload: failed to load '/usr/local/aolserver/bin/nspostgres.so': '/usr/local/aolserv
er/bin/nspostgres.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory'
Error: dbdrv: failed to load driver 'postgres'
Error: dbinit: no such default pool 'pool1'

I checked for the location of nspostgres.so driver (which I thought was included in the AOLserver 3.3oacs1 distribution), but it is no where to be found.  I thought I would try compiling the driver myself, but I get:

nspostgres.h:34:16: ns.h: No such file or directory
nspostgres.h:41:18: nsdb.h: No such file or directory
nspostgres.h:42:19: nstcl.h: No such file or directory
nspostgres.h:45:22: libpq-fe.h: No such file or directory

and (obviously) many more errors.

At this point I am thinking that the problem is something relatively simple, but that I am not seeing it because I am new to AOLServer, OpenACS, and relatively new to Linux.

I would appreciate any help, I would like to get things going by the weekend.

Thanks,
Matt.

i do not know what is included in the openacs tarball, but if you want to compile the postgres driver for aolserver, you need some header files from the aolserver and postgres include directories. those are the files listed in your error message (ns.h, nsdb.h, nstcl.h, libpq-fe.h). this files should be available in "include" subdirectories of your aolserver and postgres installation dirs.

my way of installing is to compile everything from source (i would suggest using aolserver4 and nspostgres4.0) but maybe this is not the right way for you as a newbie. the fastest way to get things running for you is probably to have a look at the Makefile of your nspostgres source and enter the correct paths to aolserver and postgres include directories (this is where the *.h files are located). When those header files are found, compiling should be working alright.

hope that helps, peter

Thanks for all of your suggestions.  I finally got things up and running by istalling Postgres (7.3.4) from source, and installing aol 4 from source.  I haven't had a chance to really test things out yet though.

Thanks again for your responses!

-Matt