Forum OpenACS Q&A: OpenACS 4 RPMs for Red Hat 7.1 exist

Posted by Jonathan Marsden on 01/15/02 02:44 PM

Finally!

See http://www.xc.org/jonathan/openacs/openacs4-rpm-based-install.html for how to grab RPMs that install PG, AOLserver and a recent CVS snapshot of OpenACS 4.

Right now only Red Hat 7.1 binary RPMs exist, recompiling under Red Hat 6.2 should be feasible, but has not been done yet.

Comments on whether these RPMs work for others, how they could be improved, etc. are very welcome.

2: Response to OpenACS 4 RPMs for Red Hat 7.1 exist (response to 1)

Posted by Sam Anderegg on 01/15/02 09:35 PM

I am just about to a fresh install of Suse Linux 7.3. Can someone
point me to a document which covers such installation under
Suse. Many thanks

3: Response to OpenACS 4 RPMs for Red Hat 7.1 exist (response to 1)

Posted by Torben Brosten on 01/15/02 11:45 PM

Hello Sam Anderegg,

about installing RPMS using SuSE try: http://sdb.suse.de/sdb/en/html/ke_rpm.html

about OpenACS 4 RPM install on SuSE, no SuSE RPM exists for OpenACS (yet). You can try Jonathan Marsden's RPM for Redhat (above) and let him know how it works...

Alternately, installing from source-code should provide you with a working system.

-Torben

4: Response to OpenACS 4 RPMs for Red Hat 7.1 exist (response to 1)

Posted by Gilbert Price on 01/16/02 02:22 AM

Johnathan, I'm trying to download your RPM's, all download fine except for the AOLServer ones. Specifically the:

aolserver-3.3.1+ad13-1.i386.rpm
aolserver-nsfts-3.3.1+ad13-1.i386.rpm
aolserver-nsxml-3.3.1+ad13-1.i386.rpm

Thanks,

5: Response to OpenACS 4 RPMs for Red Hat 7.1 exist (response to 1)

Posted by Gilbert Price on 01/16/02 04:34 AM

Okay, I know what the problem is, the links go to the files as follows:

aolserver-3.3.1+ad13-1.i386.rpm
aolserver-nsfts-3.3.1+ad13-1.i386.rpm
aolserver-nsxml-3.3.1+ad13-1.i386.rpm

and should go to:

aolserver-3.3.1-1+ad13.i386.rpm
aolserver-nsfts-3.3.1-1+ad13.i386.rpm
aolserver-nsxml-3.3.1-1+ad13.i386.rpm

The "-1" is in the wrong place...

6: Response to OpenACS 4 RPMs for Red Hat 7.1 exist (response to 1)

Posted by Jonathan Marsden on 01/17/02 01:05 AM

Gilbert, thanks for spotting the repeated typos. I just edited the HTML at

http://www.xc.org/jonathan/openacs/openacs4-rpm-based-install.html

to (I hope!) fix them.

7: Response to OpenACS 4 RPMs for Red Hat 7.1 exist (response to 1)

Posted by Jonathan Marsden on 01/17/02 02:07 AM

Sam,

Do try these RPMs and let me know what happens. If you can help me
understand any differences between Red Hat and SuSe that prevent them from working, I'll happily attempt to make these RPMs "SuSe-compatible".

Since I don't use SuSe myself at all, I don't want to create a separate set of SuSe RPMs and have to maintain them... but if a few tweaks can allow the Red Hat RPMs to also install fine on SuSe, I'd
be happy to implement those tweaks for you and other SuSe users.

8: Response to OpenACS 4 RPMs for Red Hat 7.1 exist (response to 1)

Posted by John Milazzo on 02/13/02 10:59 PM

FYI: While installing the following two AOLserver RPMs I noticed that they are looking for user and group "jonathon".

aolserver-nsxml-3.3.1-2+ad13.i386.rpm
aolserver-nsfts-3.3.1-2+ad13.i386.rpm

9: Response to OpenACS 4 RPMs for Red Hat 7.1 exist (response to 1)

Posted by Jonathan Marsden on 02/13/02 11:48 PM

I think they requried user/group jonathan, not jonathon!

Thanks for the feedback. It is my mistake completely. Looks like I need to create a new set of aolserver RPMs.

I am currently thousands of miles from the machine I use for OpenACS/AolServer RPM development (and it is on a dialout modem only). I'll definitely get to this on my return to the UK in early March, and may try to do it while on the road before that if time permits.

Meanwhile... if you do a useradd jonathan , does the install then work fine for you under Red Hat 6.2? Does the resulting OpenACS setup then work the way you would expect?

10: Installing OpenACS 4 RPMs for Red Hat 7.1 on Red Hat Linux 8.0 (response to 1)

Posted by Agon Buchholz on 01/03/03 10:23 PM

I followed the installation instructions according to Jonathan Marsden's step-by-step instructions from
http://www.xc.org/jonathan/openacs/openacs4-rpm-based-install.html on a German Red Hat Linux 8.0 system with the following differences to his setup:

- I used RHL 8.0 instead of RHL 7.1.
- I was not starting from a "clean machine", whatever
this is supposed to mean.
- Jonathan suggests to recompile the XML Libraries from
the SRPMS provided by XMLsoft which i didn't.
- I also used the more up-to-date releases from lixml2
and lixslt which were installed on my system.

Some comments on my experiences:

<blockquote> Start from a clean machine
</blockquote>

In this case I used a testing machine (SMP, 2x AMD Athlon 1900), runing several (other) services. The suggestion from Jonathan *does* make sense, but he doesn't define what kind of installation is "clean". Stopping Postgresql and removing all related packages should IMHO do the job (?).

<blockquote> Installing Postgresql 7.1.3
</blockquote>

Command:

[root@lx OpenACS]# /sbin/service postgresql stop

Results in:

postgresql-Dienst stoppen: [ OK ]

Command:

[root@lx OpenACS]# /bin/rm -rf /var/lib/pgsql/

Command:

[root@lx OpenACS]# rpm -e `rpm -qa |grep ^postgresql`

Gives several errors:

Fehler: Failed dependencies:
libpq.so.2 is needed by (installed) perl-DBD-Pg-1.13-5
libpq.so.2 is needed by (installed) xemacs-21.4.8-16
libpq.so.2 is needed by (installed) libdbi-dbd-pgsql-0.6.5-2
libpq.so.2 is needed by (installed) mod_auth_pgsql-0.9.12-11
libpq.so.2 is needed by (installed) php-pgsql-4.2.2-8.0.5
libpq.so.2 is needed by (installed) qt-PostgreSQL-3.0.5-17
libpq.so.2 is needed by (installed) bonddb-0.6.1-1
libpq.so.2 is needed by (installed) gda-postgres-0.8.199-1
libpq.so.2.0 is needed by (installed) snort-1.6-1
libpq.so is needed by (installed) bonddb-0.6.1-1
postgresql-libs is needed by (installed) php-pgsql-4.2.2-8.0.5

These packages (and several sub-dependencies) had to be removed so the system *should* be clean (?).

Commands:

rpm -Uvh postgresql-libs-7.1.3-1PGDG.i386.rpm
rpm -Uvh postgresql-7.1.3-1PGDG
rpm -Uvh postgresql-server-7.1.3-1PGDG

All OK.

<blockquote> Installing XML Libraries from ftp://ftp.xmlsoft.org/
</blockquote>

I had the following versions installed:

[root@lx OpenACS]# rpm -qa | grep libxml
libxml2-python-2.4.30-1
libxml-devel-1.8.17-5
libxml2-2.4.30-1

[root@lx OpenACS]# rpm -qa | grep libxslt
libxslt-python-1.0.23-1
libxslt-devel-1.0.23-1
libxslt-1.0.23-1

However, I did not recompile the SRPMs as advised by Jonathan.

<blockquote> Installing AOLserver
</blockquote>

Command:

rpm -Uvh aolserver-3.3.1-2+ad13.i386.rpm

<blockquote> Installing the AOLserver PG driver and nsxml modules
</blockquote>

Command:

rpm -Uvh aolserver-postgresql*.i386.rpm

Command:

rpm -Uvh aolserver-nsxml-3.3.1-2+ad13.i386.rpm

This results in:

[root@lx OpenACS]# rpm -Uvh aolserver-nsxml-3.3.1-2+ad13.i386.rpm
Preparing... ############################### [100%]
Warnung: user jonathan does not exist - using root
Warnung: group jonathan does not exist - using root
Warnung: user jonathan does not exist - using root
Warnung: group jonathan does not exist - using root
Warnung: user jonathan does not exist - using root
Warnung: group jonathan does not exist - using root
Warnung: user jonathan does not exist - using root
Warnung: group jonathan does not exist - using root
Warnung: user jonathan does not exist - using root
Warnung: group jonathan does not exist - using root
Warnung: user jonathan does not exist - using root
Warnung: group jonathan does not exist - using root
1:aolserver-nsxml ############################### [100%]

Whatever this means. Maybe it's necessary to create the user and group "jonathan"?

<blockquote> Obtaining and Installing OpenACS 4 itself
</blockquote>

Command:

rpm -Uvh openacs-4.2-alpha.20020114.noarch.rpm

This results in:

[root@lx OpenACS]# rpm -Uvh openacs-4.2-alpha.20020114.noarch.rpm
Preparing... ############################### [100%]
1:openacs ############################### [100%]
Datenbank initialisieren: [ OK ]
Starting postgresql service: [ OK ]

ERROR: Unable to start postgresql service, cannot install ACS data model
Fehler: %post(openacs-4.2-alpha.20020114) scriptlet failed, exit status 1

Here seems to be a major problem, either with the RPMs and RHL 8.0 or with my (slightly different) system.

I checked with the docs (https://openacs.org/doc/operating-system.html etc.) to
see if I could fix this manually. According to them, the following locations are used by OpenACS:

"We'll compile stuff in /usr/local/src
PostgreSQL will go into /usr/local/pgsql
AOLServer will go into /usr/local/aolserver
The web root will go into /web"

None of these directories, exept from /usr/local/src, were created on my installation so far.

According to https://openacs.org/doc/postgres.html there should be a user
'postgres' (exists, but home is /var/bin/pgsql instead of /usr/local/pgsql), and a group 'web' (doesn't exist).

At this point I stopped following the errors since the problems seem to go
deeper.

Note: the RPM is quite outdated; as of this writing, current release is 4.5.

Command:

/sbin/service aolserver start

Results in:

Starting aolserver: [ OK ]

sleep 15 # Wait for AOLserver + OpenACS to initialize

lynx http://`hostname`:8000

Gives me the following page:

"OpenACS Installation: Error
[...]
The following database pools generated errors:
OpenACS could not allocate a handle from database
pool "subquery".
[...]"

Goting to

http://localhost:8000/acs-admin/apm/packages-install

gives me the following page:

"OpenACS Installation: Installing OpenACS Core Services"

followed by a <hr>, the rest of the page is empty.

Until this is examined further I'd suggest *not* to use the old RPMs on a more recent Red Hat installation.

Are there other experiences with more receant RHL versions and OpenACS out there?

Greetings, -Agon

11: Re: Problems with Germanl Language RH 8.0 and my RPMs (response to 1)

Posted by Jonathan Marsden on 01/03/03 11:45 PM

The issue with user jonathan being needed is a bug, known and fixed here in my own RPMs. I should probably release them!

ERROR: Unable to start postgresql service, cannot install ACS data model Fehler: %post(openacs-4.2-alpha.20020114) scriptlet failed, exit status 1

This one is probably because my RPMs check for a message from the output of

/sbin/service postgresql status

which is different in different languages.

I do not know of a good way to avoid this issue, I need to experiment some more with it. The text seems to be hard coded in /etc/init.d/functions in my (USA English) Red Hat versions.

This issue is in Red Hat 7.x too, it is not new in Red Hat 8.0.

For those who wonder why my RPMs are old... the hoped-for work (starting December 2001) which would have used OpenACS was awarded to others, who used a commercial toolkit (and by some accounts the work is still not completed). This meant I had no 'work time' or even 'play time which will pay off in future' time to spend on OpenACS. Combined with multiple intercontinental family relocations (to the UK, and now back to the USA)... well, I had other priorities.

There are hopeful signs that I may have need to use OpenACS for 'real work' during 2003; that would help spur me to test and release newer OpenACS RPMs.

Jonathan