On Wed, 18 Sep 2002, Benedykt P. Barszcz wrote:

here is some feedback on me trying the KohaCD image. The computer I ran it on was connected to onother via ethernet. Kohacd booted properly with many error messages pertaining to (probably) some irrelevant kernel modules. I didn't pay attention to what was scrolling in front of my eyes so I missed the fact to provide an IP. I reacted to what it said about pressing some key combination and "space" for root password. I did that and typed "finddisk" or something like that. It didn't succseed. KohaCD worked out of the box, but I missed it! The following day I tried once more, and saw that there is a message saying something like this: you can access koha at http://192.168.0.48. I swear I did not give this IP myself and there is no DNS server in the nearest vicinity! KohaCD worked this time. OPAC looked good but there was no clear indication what the password for intranet is! It is "cat /etc/koha.conf" that will tell you the secret. I think users of KohaCD should have a better way to discover it.

You must have Internet Sharing enabled on your windows box. It uses a DHCP server for that feature, and shares the 192.168.0.0/24 subnet by default. The page that listed the ip address should also have listed the userid and password to use to access the Intranet interface. This is the last piece of information that is displayed on the screen before the login prompt. The username and password are also displayed on the sourceforge site description of the package. The only other thing I can think of to make it easier would be to add the username and password to the login screen itself on the CD. Maybe a nice addition would be to hide the errors output when trying various network card drivers. I'll add this.

KohaCD is very good and I think should be perfect for presentation. I would however insist on bundling it with a linux distro (Caldera?) with graphical interface, thus eliminating the need for another computer to be present for presentation. It is absurd to bring two computers to a library director to show him/her how nice Koha could be.

I agree that this would make for a nicer end product. The complexities involved in doing this are quite large, however: 1. The CD image will be significantly larger (requiring X and Mozilla or some other browser to be included). X alone will likely add around 50MB to the size of the image, Mozilla probably another 30MB or so. 2. Auto configuring an X server is significantly more complicated than auto configuring a network card. :) I'll play around with adding X and Mozilla a bit here, but I'd like to hear more expressions of interest or success/failure stories with the existing KohaCD before I get too carried away. Steve.