[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] open source

[Dan Scott]

> On 8/11/07, lan ye <lye at mail.slcl.org> wrote:
> > We've been researching the Evergreen Open Source Library system, and would
> like to have a list of hardware requirements for the installation of a small
> test server. To keep things within a small budget, I would like to just use
> an ordinary PC. Could you send some information to us?

For system requirements, it depends on how extensive you want your
tests to be. Evergreen and all of the pieces it depends on
(PostgreSQL, Apache, Ejabberd) run happily in a VMWare image allocated
512MB of RAM on my laptop with just the Project Gutenberg e-books
loaded, and that's enough to evaluate the OPAC interface / try out the
staff client / make some local changes and generally experiment. But
I'm not going to load one million bib records into that system and
expect it to perform. So, probably any hardware you have lying around
would be adequate for a small test server.

> > It looks like Evergreen has been successfully installed on two Linux
> systems: Gentoo and Ubuntu. Which one is the best for us to test using
> what's already in place at other libraries? Are there any differences /
> Advantages in functionality between Gentoo and Ubuntu?

As John said, GPLS is running on Debian, and that's the only Evergreen
system that is in production at the moment. However, the documentation
for installing on Debian is a bit scattered right now. The developers
themselves used Gentoo originally, and that's what I'm using at the
moment & have documented in the wiki; the install process on Ubuntu is
very thoroughly documented and Ubuntu is reasonably close to Debian.
See http://open-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=server_installation for
the list of install instructions for various distributions.

As for advantages / disadvantages of particular distributions, that's
a religious war that I don't want to step into... We'll try to help
you out no matter what distribution you choose; just please choose a
current release :)

-- 
Dan Scott
Laurentian University