Blazing Moon

Installing Koha 3.0 on Ubuntu 8.10

Introduction

What It Is

This is a guide to installing Koha from the ground up, i.e., beginning with a newly installed Ubuntu system. This guide will get you to the point where you can try Koha for evaluation purposes. It'll be a basic installation that uses Koha's internal search engine rather than the more scalable Zebra search engine.

If you plan to put Koha into production there are many other things to consider. The final page of this guide (Showtime) discusses this further.

Ubuntu 8.04 vs. 8.10

According to the Koha Wiki, Koha might have problems with Perl 5.10, the version of Perl that Ubuntu 8.10 uses.

Koha's basic functions appear to work under 8.10, and people have reported of running it under 8.10 without problems. Further, there's now reason to think that the warning about 8.04 is no longer relevant.

However, if you want to err on the side of caution you could use Ubuntu 8.04 instead. This guide was originally developed using 8.04, so the installation process should be very similar to what's described in this guide.

Who It's For

This guide does not assume you're a Linux expert. In fact it's intended for people who aren't Linux experts, so if you are one you'll be able to skip over some of the instructions. However, this guide does assume you're reasonably technical: very comfortable with computers and not flat-out scared of using a command-line interface.

Caveats (Or "Why You Shouldn't Listen to Me")

Oh, there are so very many reasons. Here are a few:

  • I've never configured a production Koha system.
  • I'm relatively new to Linux and have never administered a production Linux system.
  • Though I'm enrolled in an MLS program I haven't worked significantly in a library.

Why This Might Help You Anyway

Just one reason:

  • I can probably spare you some time-consuming learning.

In preparing this guide I've installed Koha over a dozen times, carefully documenting problems and solutions. I have significant experience in information technology and education, and I've tried to use my background to understand and explain what's happening.

Conventions

Commands you'll type at a terminal prompt look like this:

sudo su
mkdir /build
cd /build

Normally Linux guides precede each command with a shell prompt character: a $ for commands executed as an ordinary user and a # for commands executed as a superuser (root).

Unfortunately following this convention would prevent you from easily copying and pasting commands into the terminal window, and copy-paste will spare you much time and many errors during this installation. So this guide disregards convention to make your life a little easier.

Credits

Using Zebra

If you plan to use the more powerful and scalable Zebra search engine (which is better for large collections) rather than Koha's built in search engine (which is better for evaluation and smaller collections), you might find the "Install Yaz & Zebra" section of the "Koha 3 on Ubuntu Hardy Heron" tutorial a helpful addition to this guide.

I've gotten great help from the Koha mailing list and you can too. If you're installing Koha I recommend signing up for the list.

I also got help from two Koha 3 install guides. While I took a different approach in places, and am working with slightly different flavors of Linux and Koha, I very much appreciated the help they gave me beyond Koha's included installation files.