Thursday, February 11, 2010

Koha LiveCD

Writing this from Ubuntu running on a USB stick in the lab. Even better, it is running the Koha ILS (and Dspace, and OAI harvester and dbWiz - things i have wanted to use in class but could not because of the IT limitations).

Thanks to the great work of Dr. ARD Prasad (ard@drtc.isibang.ac.in) there is now a LiveCD of Koha 3.0 available. Goto http://sf.net/projects/liblivecd and download the .iso and burn the image to a CD.

You can run it from the CD and login to the Admin module or just use the OPAC (of course, until you set it up it has nothing...)

OPAC is http://localhost/opac
Admin is http://localhost/kohaadmin

the admin username is kohaadmin and the password is library. I was able to set up Koha in a few minutes and then use the built-in client to make a Z39.50 connection to the Library of Congress server and do some copy cataloging. With some books in the OPAC i was able to do some searching.

Since the OS is Ubuntu 9.10 i decided to make a bootable USB version, the idea being i could then save settings, tweak the install and add some more programs.

In Ubuntu select System, Admin, USB Startup and select your stick. I first tried a USB stick formatted with ext2 filesystem but it did not mount, so i had to reformat the stick as FAT32 so that it was detected. The Install to USB function asks how much space to reserve on the USB stick for persistent data, i select 512mb on a 2 gig stick. The Ubuntu image is about 670mb so i figured this would leave enough room.

The entire process takes about 4 minutes and when you restart the USB boots into Ubuntu from where you can setup and run Koha. Just launch Firefox all the information you need is displayed. Sweet! Many thanks to Mr. Prasad for this. I have some screenshots of the Koha setup but i need to work though it a couple of times to understand all the options and then write it up for the class lab.

There is another Koha Live CD done in Aug 2009 available from Mizstik projects at http://mizstik.com/projects/koha-livecd/ but i have not tried it. Maybe a comparison should be done. I notice the same site has a mod for Openbiblio called the Home Edition. Will have to take a look, wish someone would take over that project and get it going again...

5 comments:

gnickers said...

Just imported 50 marc records from weldon library with no problem and was also able to do copy cataloging using the z39.50 lookup for the library of congress. sweet!

Jefferson Condor said...

Good morning, I installed the LiveCD but I can not enter either the KOHA
the DSPACE, I might indicate because only appears to be installed
UBUNTU?.

I hope you can guide me how to activate these platforms.

Thank you.

heavenlyevil said...

This sounds sweet. I've been meaning to install Koha, but a live USB would be much more useful.

Kovilangulam said...

Sir
I installed the Koha software and i already entered some data(book) now i wish to upload 5000 books again how i can upload it. i already data in the excel how i can convert to MARC FILE.Please inform to me sir

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