[Koha-devel] Koha 3.00.00 debian install - a few minor observations

[Rick Welykochy]

Hi all,

I have completed a successful install of Koha/3.00.00 on Linux Deb (etch)
running as a Linux vserver guest.

My thanks and appreciation to all who contributed to making the installation
process much easier and far more fool-proof than previous versions of Koha.

I appreciated the final web-based configuration step. That allowed me (the sys
admin) to hand over a completed install to the librarian and let her configure
library thingies the way she wanted.

My guess is that the deb-based install will be the easiest for the Linux crowd.

Here are a few notes I made during the installation process. Note that the
install was done on a *very* barebones instance of debian linux, with only
a minimal number of packages installed to get the guest host to boot up. This
is why there may have been some environmental differences from what one would
normally expect in the base system.

  * debian package install is a good start and worked well,
    except libgd was not installed on my system: would be good
    to detect this and alert the sysadmin

    SOLUTION: sudo apt-get install libgd2-xpm-dev

  * cpan Perl package install worked except for 7 missing packages:

    SOLN: sudo cpan Email::Date GD HTML::Scrubber SMS::Send Text::CSV_XS Text::CSV Text::Iconv

    Of course, the GD problem was related to my not having libgb2 installed.

  * several attempts were made by debian apt to install and startup mysql 5 server,
    which we ignored since we already have a mysql 5 server that we can connect to

  * for the Koha install itself, the Perl method of make; make test seems wasteful:
    it copies some 145 MB of perl sources unnecessarily into blib then to /usr/share,
    and it takes a looooooong time. I suppose the upside is reproduceability and the
    ease of redoing parts of the make if required.

  * the instructions did not mention when to create the user 'koha':

    sudo adduser koha

  * we opt for having two domains (one for OPAC and one for admin) instead of using
    ports 80 and 8080. It was trivial to affect this change in the koha-httpd.conf
    file. Kudos on the Apache side of things :)

All in all, a very good show. No hair pulling and minor issues easily resolved.

thanks again,
rickw


-- 
________________________________________________________________
Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services || Internet Driving Instructor

The manual said Windows XP/SP2 or better so I installed Linux.