Greenstone on OSX

With more and more of our students using macs we decide to take another look at the osx version of Greenstone, now at 2.83 to see if it is usable. In the past, we recommended students stay away from the mac version and those who really, really want to use their macbook or iMac ended up installing boot camp, fusion or parallels and running greenstone in XP!

So we download the .dmg and click to install. It defaults to Users/yourusername/Greenstone. No way to change drives so it want to go on the sys drive. We decide that is ok and it gets ready to install. Note that to make greenstone actually work it has a number of dependencies. The problem in the past was users had to install and configure those dependent programs and it was not very straightforward. Now the gs installer adds apache automatically as well as installing imagemagick and ghostscript. Sweet.

We do not use the admin pages in the lab with the windows version but decide here to check it out so we tick the enable Admin pages checkbox and give it a password of admin. Click Install and away we go.

When finished we check out the greenstone folder - lots of files but which one launches the application? We click o nthe readmeEn.txt file for enlightenment...looks like the gli folder has the interface..ok but which file in there - client-gli.sh might be the bash script that runs the thing but how do you know? There is a gli.ico icon file...rather than click things at random hoping it will work, let's read the release notes. Ah....it says

On Mac and Linux, use a terminal (in Macs this is found under Applications > Utilities > Terminal) to go into the Greenstone installation directory and run

./gs2-server.sh

The small Greenstone Server will display. Run

./gli/gli.sh

To get to the Greenstone Librarian Interface

So we open a terminal window to the shell which puts us into our user directory (pwd will confirm where you are) so cd Greenstone/gli and then do ./gli.sh and joy - the usual gli interface launches. Since the gli is written in Java it is quite similar in windows, osx and linux.

One difference right at the start. You do file,new to define a collection and then have to do file,open to open the collection you just defined. We decide to test by creating a collection of midi files of Frank Zappa tunes. So we open the test collection and watch the spinner go round and round...this should not be. Ok it's crashed so we need to kill it.

Not impressed - let's try tomorrow to load the demo collection