OpenACS on MacOS X Panther (10.3)

Similar to Vinod Kurup's excellent instuctions on installing OpenACS on OSX, I like to use fink for my Un*x goodness on OSX. I started using fink way back on 10.0 - I remember the pain upgrading to 10.1 (or was it 10.2), but since I did a fresh install on 10.3 it was a breeze. It is all so much more polished now.

I am loving being back on OSX - all because it looks like I can get a cheap replacement screen for my original G4 PowerBook from a friend (thanks in advance Rutho).

I decided to go with Postgres 7.4.1 (in retrospect the current OpenACS documentation actually tells Panther users to go with 7.4 instead of 7.3 - Malte as always you are one step ahead). Compiling pg 7.4.1 needs the very latest version of bison which is ahead of both apple and fink, so I had to install bison from source.

With all this manual installing going on, I decided to start an /opt tree, So now I have very clear delineation: /opt is stuff compiled by me, /sw is compiled and/or installed by fink - everything else is from Apple or a standard OSX application/package install.

So my standard ./configure command (as used for both bison and Postgresql) is now:

Keeps everything nice and tidy :)

Like Vinod, I decided to manually add --enable-threads to both ./configure lines in fink's .info file /sw/fink/10.3/stable/main/ finkinfo/languages/tcltk-8.4.1-2.info for tcl to enable thread support. But instead of sheer laziness (in Vinod's case :P) I actually did it on purpose so that any other fink packages needing tcl (probably plenty) will work ok. Seems like an ok idea to me - but I wouldn't recommend it for anything other than a development machine.

For AolServer 4.0 I used:

so much nicer than the old aolserver 3/ArsDigita configuration files! Note that I have merged everything under /opt - probably better to use the prefix /opt/aolserver .

Note that for some reason, the aolserver sourceforge archive has no tarball for nsrewrite - you have to get it from cvs. Details and other Aolserver 4 installation help is in this OpenACS 5.0 document. Basically, after the above .configure, I did the following to install the required modules:

I didn't need to edit nssha1.c like Vinod did - the current version only generates a warning which you can ignore.

Ok - AOLServer works now. Time for bed :) GAH - 3:43 am!!

Oops - forgot to install tDom. Unlike in Aolserver 3, we install the tDom library into our system instead of libtdom into the aolserver directory. As per Vinod's instructions, edit the tDOM-0.7.8/unix/CONFIG file by uncommenting the Aolserver 4 section - but modify it to say this instead (again supplying your prefix of choice):

Then:

If you get "invalid command dom" in your error.log, then aolserver is not finding tdom. Assuming you have installed it, check your LIBRARY_PATH I guess.