[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] newbie evergreen server build

[John Hudson]

 <Bryan.Low at ...> writes:

> Am about to start an attempt at building an evergreen server in
> Aberdeenshire, and would welcome any recommendations/advice/feedback.
> 
> I haven't settled on anything yet but was thinking about using Ubuntu
> server as a platform and picking my way throughthe online How-To install
> from the evergreen site, would be glad of any advice.

I'm a relative beginner with Linux and assume you're more experienced than I 
am. I only managed to get a basic system working on my third attempt (starting 
with a clean OS each time) and after a great deal of frustration. I still 
haven't managed to get the UK localisation to work and am posting separately 
about that issue. So, initially I would say you need lots of patience and some 
Linux expertise. I spent many hours over a period of weeks installing Ubuntu, 
then Debian (on two different PCs) and going through the installation 
procedure, encountering errors each time. 

Pay particular attention to the changes of user. There are several of these in 
the instructions and I found it was easy to miss one unless I marked the user 
in the margin before following the instruction. For this reason, I was more 
comfortable with Debian than Ubuntu, because Ubuntu out of the box makes you 
use 'sudo' instead of 'su', which I find more fiddly. (I know Ubuntu can be 
configured to allow 'su' but I didn't want any more complications.)

You need to do a certain amount of reading between the lines because sometimes 
the instructions make assumptions, or miss things out. For example, in 
http://open-ils.org/documentation/install/README_2_1_0.html, I've pencilled 
in "Change back to directory above" before the installation instruction for 
MAKE_STAFF_CLIENT_STAMP_ID - this initially gave me a "Not found" error. There 
are a few cases where the instructions refer to "your user" and I was confused 
about which user was meant.

Good luck!