Error 500 on localhost installation

Hi

I read about Omeka in the latest Scout bulletin and thought I'd give it a go on my Macbook, running it on localhost with XAMPP:

PHP 5.3.0
MySQL 5.1.37

I downloaded v1.1 and unzipped the archive, put it into local web space, and tried to access it at http://localhost/~fredriley/test/omeka after cranking up XAMPP. I got an error 500. Another curiousity is that when accessing the parent directory, the /omeka directory didn't list even though it has the same permissions and owners as the other dirs:

drwxr-xr-x 7 fredrile fredrile 238 Feb 5 18:27 .
drwxr-xr-x 22 fredrile fredrile 748 Jan 5 18:29 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 fredrile fredrile 6148 Feb 5 18:24 .DS_Store
drwxr-xr-x 37 fredrile fredrile 1258 Jan 15 20:35 PHP
drwxr-xr-x 25 fredrile fredrile 850 Nov 6 13:17 dotproject
drwxr-xr-x 2 fredrile fredrile 68 Oct 28 20:48 images
drwxr-xr-x 17 fredrile fredrile 578 Oct 15 14:42 omeka

I had a look at the Apache error log in /var/log/httpd/ but there were no entries for today.

I've edited the db.ini file as follows:

[database]
host = "localhost"
username = "root"
password = ""
name = "omeka"
prefix = "omeka_"
;port = ""

That is the correct user and pass for the local mySQL installation.

I did have a look in the docs and forum for "error 500" and hit:

http://omeka.org/forums/topic/install-errors
http://omeka.org/forums/topic/admin-login

but neither thread was directly relevant.

Does anyone have any suggestions? This smells of a .htaccess error but in the latter thread above users are advised against .htaccess editing.

Here is a thread on XAMPP that you might want to read through.
http://omeka.org/forums/topic/installing-omeka-on-xampp

We don't support XAMPP specifically, but if anyone else has ideas please jump in.

Thanks for the reply and pointer, Sheila. I didn't think to look for XAMPP in the forums. I don't think the thread you quote is relevant as the original poster's problem is a Zend error. In one of the replies wanderingwill wrote that he:

"was able to successfully install Omeka on XAMPP for the Mac under the /Applications/XAMPP/htdocs directory, although XAMPP had .htaccess problems for mod_rewrite and setting php settings under my user's Sites directory. "

He didn't specify what the problems were, though. I don't think that this is a XAMPP issue in particular - XAMPP is purely a handy bundle with Apache, mySQL and PHP, so any errors it throws will be related to one of these three. I still think that there's a smell of a .htaccess problem with the error 500, but my eyes glazed over when I looked at the mod_rewrites in the code as I'm not much good at regexes. Maybe I should try to comment out lines and see what happens?

I'll give it a go on a Windoze machine with XAMPP to see if the problem recurs. I do have an old tin box running Linux upstairs but I've not cranked that up in a while.

Fred

Have you tried using MAMP?