[Koha-devel] Re: CD image request

[Tonnesen Steve]

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.