[Erp5-users] Re: Debian installation help?

[Toni Mueller]

Hello,

On Thu, 02.11.2006 at 11:01:13 -0500, kristian at nexedi.com <kristian at nexedi.com> wrote:
> Can you please describe in more detail what kind of problems you had with the 
> LiveCD ?

sure, no problem.

Problem #1: I didn't read the readme.txt on the CD but simply assumed
that it would boot to a full system (like eg. Knoppix or the OGo test
CD). After it booted, I saw an error message in Konqueror that said
something like "check your settings", and ERP5 was offline. So I tried
to access the CD from KDE which didn't work. The error I got when
clicking the CD in "machine" from KDE was like "The CD is already
mounted", but it wasn't when I looked at it from the shell ("mount
-a"). I was unable to manually mount the CD, too, and said readme.txt
was therefore inaccessible. So, I read the CD on a different machine
which was already running Linux to obtain that file. The expected list
of passwords was not contained in that file, but it showed the folder
expected by the system that I was also unaware of. After some searching
on the web site I eventually came across a sufficiently good list that
allowed me root access (at least).

I booted the CD and found that no MySQL or Zope processes were running.
So, I got root and ran the init script manually, but it bombed out with
an obscure error. It turned out that this script didn't like my
existing Linux partitions because I had too many of them (hda1..hda13).
That script can apparently only grok partition schemes with
single-digit partition numbers.  So, I decided to re-format the drive
for ERP5 and ran "cfdisk /dev/hda" and "mkfs /dev/hda1" from a root
shell from that CD to create a sufficiently large root partition (1
partition only... should work ok, no?). Wrong again, since for some
obscure reason, the system was unable to format more than some 378MB
from the 40gig disk... I worked around this by popping in a Debian
Sarge netinstall CD and proceeded up to the creation of an appropriate
partition, then created that folder, then rebooted with the LiveCD. Got
it... now the system came up ok.

Since it was empty, I thought I'd install some business templates which
should give me a feel for what a "full-featured" ERP5 would be like.
So, I first hooked up to the network and then fetched an updated list
of business templates. I selected most interesting things (probably
half of what was available, but not the appareil stuff) and tried to
have it installed. This resulted in an error because ERP5 ran out of
room. It turned out that the system somehow had filled the root
partition which appears to be a union mount bound by the size of RAM. I
found no quick way to place that part of the installation
(/mnt/erp5_cd) on the disk where I had ample space available, so I
rebooted and tried again with only very few business templates. This
worked until I came to a screen which contained a long list of items,
each accompanied by a drop down menu that was preset to 'Install' for
most items. On the bottom, I found a button that said something which I
interpreted as "Commit", so I clicked that. This gave me Zope
tracebacks for most things I tried, in several incarnations of "reboot,
update, install", so in the end, I gave up on that. I "focussed" on CRM
and finance stuff.

In the meantime I also got a feel for what this init script of yours
does when run with 'start' or 'stop'. ERP5 is a big system and I didn't
look if this script has other options, but on 'start', it creates an
emtpy ERP5 installation which is purged again on 'stop'. So, there is
no easy way to do one step now, then shut down the box and continue
tomorrow. Since I had problems running the "install me" option before
and also experienced that problem with manually formatting the drive, I
abstained from trying this option again. Also, a quick look suggested
that this system might still be based on Zope 2.7 which is sort of
"dead" upstream. Newer versions promise to be much faster due to
enhancements in the ZODB, too.

In summary, I came across what I consider a number of problems in the
Mandriva version used which I don't even want to attempt to solve, and
some more in ERP5 (in addition to my own, like not reasearching enough
before I started). Therefore, I decided that it would be more promising
to produce a method to install ERP5 from source, and on a _current_
Debian system where I know much better what I'm doing than I do on
Mandriva (obviously).

My test bed was a Celeron 2.6GHz with 512 megs of RAM and a 40gig IDE
disk.


Best,
--Toni++