Blazing Moon

Installing Koha 3.0 on Ubuntu 8.10

Webmin

Webmin is a feature-rich, web-based application that lets you manage an impressive variety of things on your system—from basic Linux functions like backups and user management, to system services like MySQL. If you're comfortable using the command line for these things, or if you prefer another configuration manager, that's fine. Webmin is a good choice otherwise.

Install Webmin

Copy/Pasting Code

To paste code into the Terminal window press Shift-Control-V.

Sometimes in this guide you'll see several commands listed right after one another. You might be tempted to copy and paste all of the commands at once.

The risk: some of the commands will have questions for you, and rather than letting you answer the questions they'll just accept your next Linux command as your answer. That could be bad. So unless you're sure there will be no prompt, copy lines individually.

Enter the following at a command line prompt to install the required libraries:

sudo su
apt-get install libnet-ssleay-perl
apt-get install libauthen-pam-perl
apt-get install libio-pty-perl
apt-get install libmd5-perl
apt-get install openssl

Now download and install Webmin. If the /build directory already exists, the mkdir build command will give you a "File exists" error; you may ignore it. Also, this guide has been written for Webmin 1.441 but if you'd like to install a later version you certainly may.

cd /
mkdir build
cd build
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/webadmin/webmin_1.441_all.deb
dpkg -i webmin_1.441_all.deb

At the end you'll see a message like this:

Webmin install complete. You can now login to https://[machinename]:10000/ as root with your root password, or as any user who can use sudo to run commands as root.

Access Webmin

Webmin Secure Access

To access Webmin you have to use https:// (SSL) rather than http://. You'll sometimes create and alter user accounts through Webmin and you really don't want those passwords flying around your network in plaintext.

You can use https://localhost:10000 when you're logged into the server itself. The first time you visit the site from a given computer, the browser will give you a warning message. For Firefox it'll look something like this:

Secure Connection Failed
[machinename]:10000 uses an invalid security certificate.
The certificate is not trusted because it is self signed.
(Error code: sec_error_untrusted_issuer).

...which sounds like something nefarious is about to happen. This message is normally a good and helpful thing. It means your browser is trying to prevent you from inadvertently trusting an unknown but evil person. In this case the message isn't useful since the web server you're being asked to trust is your own.

If you yourself are an evil person then there's cause for concern. Otherwise you can work around the error as follows:

  1. Click "Or you can add an exception..." in the message.
  2. Click the "Add Exception" button.
  3. Click the "Get Certificate" button.
  4. Click the "Confirm Security Exception" button.

Once you reach the login page you'll need to log in as a user with root privileges.