[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Evergreen installtion problems

[Rogan Hamby]

> Has anyone been able to install opensrf & evergreen without consultant 
> support  - and if you did - what was the trick that made it work on a 
> standard Ubuntu server installation? 

The first part of the question: yes.  I've installed several versions, 
each with some difficulty but successfully.  I'm neither a Linux nor 
Evergreen guru though I'm comfortable with the Linux command line.  If 
you're not comfortable with Linux this probably isn't the project for you.  
My second recommendation is to read the accompanying documentation 
carefully.  I once burned several hours because I didn't read about the 
postgresql compatibility and was installing on a too new version of ubuntu 
with a newer version of postgresql.  I ended up reinstalling without 
postgresql and then manually adding an older version and learned from it.
 
> We are trying to setup a server for a group of libraries to evaluate 
> evergreen - but have not been able to get it to install and have not 
> received responses to any of our questions.  We have tried several 
> different versions of ubuntu (8.04 and 9.04) We have been able to get 
> opensrf to work a couple of times, but were unable to get evergreen to 
> work.  We have had several network oriented people to try it and none 
> have had any success.

I really can't comment on this except to say that network and sever people 
(even Microsoft server versus Novell server versus Linux server folks) can 
bring very different skills.  And there can be bumps.  I remember one of 
the 1.4 versions where the instructions said to restart a specific service 
and in fact you had to restart several core services.  Being comfortable 
with Linux I was lazy and continually up arrowed to rerun a command I 
already had to enter that restarted the core services and never ran into 
the problem.  Meanwhile it stumped a very skilled colleague of mine who is 
mainly a Windows person who dutifully put in what it said to put in.  
Anyway, this is a long way of saying that Evergeen doesn't require the 
Oracle of Delphi but sometimes even good technical people can be the 
square peg trying to get into a round hole.  

> Is there anyone out there who has a different set of installation 
> instructions, scripts, or binaries.  We do not believe the instructions
> from the evergreen site are complete.  We think we are missing
> something 
> simple, but consistantly.   We have tried several  "solutions" found in
> various threads.  We have noticed that almost everyone has had a 
> difficult time during installation  - please let us know the
> combination 
> of operating system/opensrf/evergreen version you were able to get to 
> work  and how you did it.

It's been a while since I looked at the install instructions (I haven't 
installed a new version really since 1.6 came out) but I know of quite a 
few folks who have installed from scratch with those who had no previous 
Evergreen experience.

> Please help if you can - we have spent a few weeks on this already and 
> would very much like to get to the next level.

Best of luck to you.