Installation on windows

Dear all developers,

Thanks for this seemingly neat solution, but so far I have only been able to look around as I am on an Windows XP environment.

What are the hurdles towards an XP installation of omeka?

Looking forward to your advice.

With regards
/Gobezu

Hi Gobezu,

If you are asking if it is possible to install Omeka and run it on your local PC with Windows XP, unfortunately the answer is no. You could try getting an account with Dreamhost: http://dreamhost.com/ or another service as noted by other Omeka users.

Once Omeka is installed and is running on a Linux system, the admin interface--where you add and edit items, build exhibits, et al--is accessible through any web browser on any operating system.

We plan to offer a hosted version of Omeka by 2009, if you can wait that long.

Below are the system requirements, just as a reminder.

* Linux operating system
* Apache HTTP server
o make sure mod_rewrite is enabled
* PHP scripting language
o 5.2.x or greater
* MySQL relational database management system
o 5.0 or greater
* ImageMagick image manipulation software
o installation is mandatory for resizing images in Omeka

Hello!

I was able to install Omeka on Windows XP using XAMPP.

However, I am having problems with the display on my browser, CSS and Javascript is not working. I believe that it is caused by the backslash \ used as directory separator on Windows. I used web developer firefox extension to view the source. Here is the portion I think which is causing the error:

<!-- Stylesheets -->
<link rel="stylesheet" media="screen" href="http://localhost/om\themes\default\css\screen.css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" media="print" href="http://localhost/om\themes\default\css\print.css" />

<!-- JavaScripts -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://localhost/om\shared\javascripts\prototype.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://localhost/om\shared\javascripts\prototype-extensions.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<script src="http://localhost/om\shared\javascripts\scriptaculous.js?load=effects,dragdrop" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://localhost/om\shared\javascripts\search.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Here is the portion when I view the generated source:

<link rel="stylesheet" media="screen" href="http://localhost/om%5Cthemes%5Cdefault%5Ccss%5Cscreen.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" media="print" href="http://localhost/om%5Cthemes%5Cdefault%5Ccss%5Cprint.css"><!-- JavaScripts -->

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://localhost/om%5Cshared%5Cjavascripts%5Cprototype.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://localhost/om%5Cshared%5Cjavascripts%5Cprototype-extensions.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<script src="http://localhost/om%5Cshared%5Cjavascripts%5Cscriptaculous.js?load=effects,dragdrop" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://localhost/om%5Cshared%5Cjavascripts%5Csearch.js" charset="utf-8"></script><!-- Plugin Stuff --></head><body>

I am guessing that making the directory separator hardcoded as forward slash may fix this. Could this be edited or changed in the zipped file provided for download?

I am sorry for being hardheaded on installing Omeka on Windows, it is just that I thought I can give it a shot :-)

By the way, I have installed Omeka on Ubuntu 7.10 successfully, side by side with WordPress, and I am currently adding data so I don't have much to show yet. I will post the URL once it is respectable enough.

Thanks!
mon

You're right, it should use '/' instead of a hardcoded DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR for making URLs. My guess is that that is not the only thing that would be broken on Windows, but I'm not sure, since we haven't designed or tested it for Windows.

It sounds like you're serious about getting it to work on Windows, so my recommendation would be to check out a copy of Omeka through our version control system (SVN). If you install SVN on windows, you can check out Omeka with the following command:

svn co https://omeka.org/svn/branches/stable-0.9/

That is our most up-to-date development branch, and you can keep up with bug fixes by updating your copy every once in a while.

If you can hack it to get it to work on Windows, you can then leverage SVN to send us your changes, and we might be able to incorporate that into a future release.

Thanks for all your help!

I was able to get it to run on Windows with XAMPP, including the stylesheets, and running ImageMagick, by making the following changes:

1. Change all the instances of DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR to something else (I used WIN_DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR), then add this line to the paths.php file:
define('WIN_DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR', '/');
That makes the CSS and other things work.
2. In the file application/models/File.php, I changed the return value of the checkForImageMagick function from "return($convert_return == 0);" to "return($convert_return == 1);" (needed because convert.exe returns an error code of 1 if you execute it without any arguments on Windows - on Linux it returns an error code of 0). (#2 here is a pretty serious mistake - don't do this, look at my post immediately below this one.)

I haven't found anything yet that isn't working.

On second thought, just changing the error code to 1 is a bad idea, since it will not test if ImageMagick is working properly. Instead, I've changed the checkForImageMagick function definition to this:

protected static function checkForImageMagick($path) {
$imageMagickTestCommand = $path . " logo: " . ARCHIVE_DIR . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR ."logo.gif";
exec($imageMagickTestCommand, $convert_version, $convert_return);
return($convert_return == 0);
}

That fulfills the original intent of testing that the installation of ImageMagick is working properly, including the ability of ImageMagick and the web server to write to the Archive folder.

This sounds great! Thanks for sharing. I've posted about your effort on the developer mailing list (see this post: http://groups.google.com/group/omeka-dev/browse_thread/thread/fa55320086fdfb09), and hope that we can hash-out a solution that can possibly be implemented into core. If you're interested, please join the developer group and follow the conversation.

@briguy.brn: any chance you could post a short step-by-step for a newb? I'm about to install Xampp as a development environment for another cms and would like to use it as a development environment for Omeka as well.

If you post text instructions, I'll make a screencast of the installation and post a link here.

In case people are reviewing this thread (which was started 12 months ago), note that the current stable release is available on subversion by running the following:

svn co https://omeka.org/svn/branches/stable-0.10/

Hi just joining and also have installed Omeka on XAMPP Lite on Win XP. Internet Explorer does seem to pick up the style sheets OK but Firefox and Opera do not

Hi,

Happy to hear that omeka works on windows platform.
Can anyone please let me know what I need to do after installing Xampp on windows,so as to start working with omeka on windows7...

Thanks,
Mark