Ubuntu Dapper Server Installation Error

[mwarndt]

When attempting to install the Alfresco binary, AlfrescoCommunity-1.4-Linux-x86-Install, I receive the error: "./AlfrescoCommunity-1.4-Linux-x86-Install: error while loading shared libraries: libX11.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory".  I tried to perform some research regarding the libX11.so.6; however, I cannot find any leads.  I am currently using Ubuntu Dapper Server, no GUI.

Thank you for any help.  Do I need to install a GUI?

[heckle]

I have used the AlfrescoCOmmunity-1.4-linux-x86-install it does give you a gui wizard-like install. I don't know that there are any options for running the install without a gui. You might have to take the long way, and install sun-java5-jdk, plus tomcat5.5 or jboss, and a database like mysql, and if you want the awesome document conversion capabilities, openoffice. Of course than you download the alfresco.war file and copy it to the right place.

I have found many oddities while installing on edgy. I don't know if you will run into the same problems, but watch out for these:

If you do a standalone tomcat5.5, the security settings do not let alfresco launch. I cheated and modified the /etc/default/tomcat5.5 to turn off security (although this is not recommended) for testing. The recommended method would have you add permissions to one of the files in /etc/tomcat5/policy.d. I tried to do this, figuring out, one by one, what permissions alfresco needed by reading the errors in the log files. After a half hour of that silliness, it went out the window.

I also had to manually set the JAVA_HOME settings in the same file to point to the directory for java. ( I can't recall the directory , but the docs for sun-java5-jdk or sun-java5-jre has info on it. There should be a file named JAVA_HOME in /usr/share/docs/sun-java5-jre or jdk. Just cat the file to read it.) I did not have to do this in Debian etch.

Also, the standalone tomcat on ubuntu edgy and other debain based distros launches on port 8180 instead of 8080 like on less sexy distros.

for image conversion you will have to install imagemagick. Once installed, in /usr/bin you need to create a symbolic link for convert to imconvert by issuing the command
ln -s convert imconvert
(make sure this is in /usr/bin)

If you use standalone tomcat, you will find that it launches at startup while you have to manually start openoffice with a script or on the command line. This is a major pain as described below. I actually gave up on using the alfresco.war with a standalone tomcat for a while.

The document conversions just would not work if openoffice is launched after tomcat, and/or with a different user.So I cheated again and edited the init file for tomcat5 and changed the TOMCAT_USER to root. The file is at /etc/init.d/tomcat5 - Again I don't know how secure this is, but I needed it to work. You might be more clever.

I copied the script from one of the other bundles for alfresco to launch openoffice as a daemon. For now I manually launch the start_oo.sh script then wait for 10 seconds and manually start tomcat by doing /etc/init.d/tomcat5 start as root. If you do not stop tomcat from launching at system startup, you might have to stop tomcat first, then restart it.

This all seems to work fine on Debian etch and Ubuntu 6.10 Desktop. I could not get the document conversion feature to work on dapper LTS.

I will mention for the sake of not shutting up, that I had done so much testing with alfresco and mysql, that when I reinstalled alfresco/tomcat and used mysql, alf would not start. I had to remove the old alfresco database in mysql and recreate it using the instructions provided. I also modified the database creation file that alfresco offers to make sure that the alfresco database is created in utf8. To the file db_setup.sql, on the line "create database alfresco;", I added "default character set utf8" before the closing ;.

There are other small details to watch our for. If anyone is interested in more, just post a comment here and I will try to help.

Hopes this helps someone.