Blazing Moon

Installing Koha 3.0 on Ubuntu 8.10

System

Searching for Help

Linux is constantly evolving, as are Koha and the packages and libraries it uses. This means your Koha installation experience can easily vary from day to day. For example, my first installation attempt was at a time when an important code server was down, which lead to some educational (read "unpleasant") problems.

When searching for help in these situations it'll be ideal if you find information related to Koha on Ubuntu. If not, bear in mind that Ubuntu is a Debian-based Linux distribution, so tips related to Debian will probably apply to you. Failing that, tips related to any Linux distro might be of help.

Beside blindly Googling, you can search Nabble's archive of posts to the Koha Mailing List.

Install Ubuntu 8.10

This install guide assumes you are using a freshly installed Ubuntu 8.10 system. If you're using an existing Ubuntu system that has other software installed, or are using a Linux distro other than Ubuntu, some of the steps in this guide will be different.

If you haven't installed Ubuntu yet you can download it from the Ubuntu website. Once you've downloaded the Ubuntu CD you'll need to use a software package like InfraRecorder to burn the CD image file (.iso file) to a CD. Once that's done you can install Ubuntu. You'll find instructions on installing Ubuntu at the Official Ubuntu Documentation site.

Access the Linux Shell

You'll perform most of the steps of this installation at a command-line shell prompt. You can access the shell via the GNOME Terminal utility: Applications > Accessories > Terminal.

Optional: Configure a Shortcut for Terminal

As you install and configure Koha you'll spend a good bit of time in the terminal, so it's worth setting up a way to launch it quickly. To do this you can either:

  1. Go to the Applications > Accessories and drag the Terminal icon up to the menu bar at the top of the screen.
  2. Go to System > Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts, scroll down and click on "Run a Terminal", then press a keypress combination that will launch terminal for you. This is my preferred approach. I use Shift-Ctrl-Alt-D for "DOS Prompt", which I suppose both dates me and telegraphs my technical background. For that matter using the word "telegraph" probably dates me too.

Optional: Increase the Terminal's Scroll History

Often it can be useful to scroll back through the history of your terminal window to see what happened, or to copy and paste text so you can email it to others for help. By default the terminal window's scroll history is meager, so it's worth increasing it. From within the Terminal application go to: Edit > Profile Preferences > Scrolling tab > set the Scrollback to at least 20,000 lines. This might sound like a lot, but a complete Koha installation can generate well over 50,000 lines of scroll-back history.

And no, that's not a typo: fifty thousand lines of command line entries and diagnostic messages. Getting nervous yet? Take a few deep breaths. It'll be ok.