Greenstone Digital Library Software

We have used the GSDL software from UW in NZ under windows but it was orginally developed for Linux and then ported so we wanted to try it out on Ubuntu. The longer term goal is to then use the server install with the Ubuntu server machine so that it can do OAI and Z39.50 harvesting.

Anyway Greenstone has some dependencies, you need a JVM and the ImageMagick image processing utilities. We had installed Java a long time ago so all we needed to do is to run the package manager an install imagemagick.

Next it is off to the Greenstone home page at http://www.greenstone.org/download to get gsdl-2.80-unix.tar.gz and to open it with the archive manager. We drag the gsdl-2.80-unix folder to our home directory and take a look at the readme file. The home page says:

To install this distribution, extract the gzipped tar archive and run the setupLinux.bin Java-based Installer program. Alternatively, run the Install.sh shell script from within the gsdl-X.XX-unix/Unix directory (see the Installer's Guide for more detailed installation instructions).

The readme notes look a lot older and say Unix installation: execute setupLinux.bin but the date is Nov 2007 and the version is 2.75, however there is a setupLinux.bin file but it does nothing.

Ooops we forgot you have to do sudo ./ so we execute sudo ./setupLinux.bin and the installer runs. We get a similar problem with version 2.80 that we got under windows - it can't seem to find the JVM. In windows we had to point it to c:\program files\java\something\java.exe and from the error message it says it can't find a valid JRE.

This application requires a Java Run Time Environment (JRE)
to run. Searching for one on your computer was not successful.
Please use the command line switch -is:javahome to specify
a valid JRE. For more help use the option -is:help.

I must admit not to liking java very much - my experience has been it is a pain to install, you go to the sun site and there seem to be many versions all poorly explained, there are lots of updates that take tons of disk space - the clients seems very picky about versions so that lots of things fail due to incompatibilities on then it is dog slow to load on a web browser. So do we need a JRE?

So it's off to the package manager to search for JRE and yes it is there and no we do not have it installed so we now install it. I think the confusion was when we installed 'Java' before using either the restricted options or automatix it just installs a web browser plugin. The Sun Java 6 Web Start control panel is there and i tested the web browser using pages from our cold fusion server that have applets. The problem here is that 'java' is too generic a word. Anyway with the JRE installed we restart the installation program.

The Installshield installer runs and searches for a JVM. Can't seem to find one.

So tomorrow we have to find where java is located and run the install using the -is:javahome switch.