Table of Contents

Greenstone 3.08 Release Notes

Release Name: 3.08

Release Date: 23 Nov 2016.

Released:

Release Candidate History

Installation Instructions

Installing and running the binary release

Note that in some cases, the following doesn't work

 export TMPDIR=/something/else
 ./Greenstone-3.08-linux

Use the following instead

 TMPDIR=/something/else ./Greenstone-3.08-linux

During the installation process you will be presented with several options. For many, the default settings will be sufficient. Some important options are

Once you have successfully installed Greenstone3, you can start up the server by choosing Grenstone3 Digital Library from the Start menu (Windows) or running gs3-server.sh/bat. This launches a small server program which starts up Tomcat and launches a browser. A small window pops up which allows you to change some settings for your library and restart the Tomcat server. Closing this program will stop Tomcat running. By default, your library will be available at localhost:8383/greenstone3/library. File→Settings in the Greenstone Server window gives you options to change the port number and which browser it uses by default. More notes about running Greenstone can be found in the README.txt file in the top level Greenstone folder.

To build collections, run GLI from the Start menu (Windows) or by running gli/gli.sh/bat in the top level Greenstone3 folder. Tutorial exercises about building collections in Greenstone 3 can be found here. Make sure you select the Greenstone3 tab at the top if it is not already selected.

Installing and running GS3.08 on Mac Maverick and Yosemite machines

From GS3.07rc2 onwards, we're including a JRE with Mac Mountain Lion binaries, so that the 3.08 Mountain Lion binaries should work on Maverick and Yosemite machines out of the box. (At present the source code still does not compile up on these newer Mac Operating Systems.)

Installing in text-only mode

* Refer to Running the installer in text-only mode

Adding source code to a binary release

Installing a source release

Further instructions

Changing the admin password

Login to the administration page, 'edit' the admin account, and click 'change password'. Alternatively, you can login as admin via the login button at the top right of each page. Once you are logged in, this button will change to say 'admin'. Click this button and select 'account settings'. From there, you can select 'change password'.

Setting up your Greenstone OAI Server and using GLI to download over OAI from a Greenstone server

In Greenstone 3, collections should be available over OAI by default. Their collectionConfig.xml files already specify that each collection is OAI enabled, through use of an OAIPMH serviceRack element. If you want to disable a collection from being accessibile over OAI, comment out the OAIPMH serviceRack element in that collection's collectionConfig.xml. You would do so by embedding the entire element in comment markers:

  <!--
    <serviceRack name="OAIPMH">
        ...
    </serviceRack>
  -->

If you wish to validate the Greenstone 3 OAIServer, edit resources/oai/OAIConfig.xml to add in the adminEmail property to contain the email to where test results should be sent. Also set the repositoryId field to a ID name you want (e.g. to greenstone), beware that there are some naming conventions that govern valid values for repositoryID. If testing the behaviour of the resumptionToken, set the resumeAfter element to a low value like 5. Then restart the Greenstone server.

To validate your OAI server, visit http://www.openarchives.org/Register/ValidateSite. Your server must be available over the internet to do this. The machine on which you're running the Greenstone 3 server will have to have its firewall and virtual server (port-forwarding) settings set up such that the Greenstone server can be made accessible to the outside world.

Setting up your Greenstone 3 OAI Server is covered in further detail in the tutorial http://wiki.greenstone.org/gsdoc/tutorial/gs3-current/en/GS_OAI_server.htm

For further information on your Greenstone OAI Server, please read through OAI support.

Setting up a remote Greenstone 3 server

This will allow remote client-GLI applications to connect to your Greenstone server, to remotely create and upload new collections to be built and hosted by your server machine.

Remote Greenstone 3 Server

To install the server-side functionality:

1. If you're on Windows, you will need to teach Greenstone where the perl executable is.

You can do this either manually, by editing a couple of Greenstone config files as explained just below, or you could run the Greenstone server once and press Enter Library button to visit your library home page. Doing so will automatically set up the perl path in various Greenstone files.

To do this manually on Windows,

a. Open Tomcat's conf/web.xml file for editing (found in greenstone3/packages/tomcat/conf folder, if installed in the default location), as you may need to specify the full path of the Perl library for the parameter "executable" of CGIServlet. This takes the form:

<init-param>
	<param-name>executable</param-name>
        <param-value>C:\Program Files\greenstone3\gs2build\bin\windows\perl\bin\perl.exe</param-value>
</init-param>

b. Edit the first line of the greenstone3/web/WEB-INF/cgi/gliserver.pl file and specify the full path of the perl binary. On Windows this will be (if installed in the default location):

#!C:\Program Files\greenstone3\gs2build\bin\windows\perl\bin\perl -w

2. Make the Greenstone "collect" directory, located in web/sites/localsite, writeable by the webserver user.

On Unix, use chmod.

On Windows, run in a DOS prompt:

cacls "C:\Program Files\Greenstone3\web\sites\localsite\collect" /P Everyone:F

3. Open up the file build.properties located in your greenstone installation folder. Edit the tomcat.server property's value to refer to your server machine's hostname instead of leaving it at the default value of "localhost":

# tomcat info
tomcat.server=your-server-computer-name

Once the server is started up, this will update the same property in greenstone's web/WEB-INF/classes/global.properties file. Then images viewed from a browser on the client side will refer to the correct location on the remote machine.

(If you don't know what your machine's host name is and you're on Windows, then open a DOS prompt and type:

ipconfig /all

Scroll to the top of the output that gets printed to the screen and note what it mentions for HOST NAME. Also note the DNS Suffix Search List.

Put these two together with a period mark to separate them and use this as the value for your tomcat.server property.)

4. Set up your Greenstone environment if you've not already done so by running gs3-setup.bat in your Greenstone 3 installation folder (source ./gs3-setup.bash on Linux and Mac machines). And then start up your Greenstone 3 server with:

ant start

(or ant restart)

5. Check that Tomcat and Greenstone3 are working correctly by visiting

http://<your-machine-name>:<port>/greenstone3/library

6. Add some user accounts by visiting the Greenstone 3 home page (http://YOURHOST:YOURPORT/greenstone3/library), clicking the admin link at the top right and logging in. The username is admin. By default, the password is admin too, unless you already set this during the installation process or if you changed this afterwards.

Once logged in, go to the Administration page. You can access this via the link on the home page. (Or you can click the admin link, choose Account Settings, and then click the Administration Page link on the top left. )

Add a new user by providing a new username, setting a password for the user that's a minimum of 3 characters long, and by using the drop-down provided for the Groups field to one or more of the available options, such as personal-collections-editor.

Even if only the admin user wishes to use the client-gli, they will still need to log in to the Administration Page once after installation in order for the user database to be set up.

7. Finally, visit the following page in the web browser to test that your remote Greenstone server is set up properly:

http://<your-machine-name>:<port>/greenstone3/cgi-bin/gliserver.pl?cmd=check-installation

You should get a message saying "Java found" and "Installation OK!" Important: You cannot continue until this is successful, as the Remote Greenstone 3 server will not work without it!

If you get a message saying "Java failed"

Client-GLI

Assuming that the remote Greenstone server is accessible to the outside world and you're not behind a firewall, you can access the remote Greenstone server from a client-gli application installed on any other machine. To do so,

1. Run client-gli quite as you would GLI. It's accessible from the Windows Start menu, otherwise you can run the client-gli script (located at the toplevel of a Greenstone installation) from a terminal.

2. You'll be asked for the gliserver.pl URL of the remote Greenstone 3 server that you wish to connect to. This is of the form

http://<remote-gs3-server-machine-name>:<remote-port>/greenstone3/cgi-bin/gliserver.pl

It's the same URL as in Step 10 of setting up the remote GS3 server above.

GLI Applet Additional Steps

Many browsers have stopped supporting Java applets. Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and perhaps Microsoft Edge, still support it. So these next steps are for Windows machines using Internet Explorer.

If your end users will be using the GLI applet, you also need to do the following steps in addition to Setting up your remote Greenstone 3 server. These next steps require the Java SDK – if you don't already have this you can download it from here; make sure that the Java SDK's bin directory is included in the PATH environment variable, which may or may not have been done automatically upon installing Java.

    keytool -genkey -alias privateKey -keystore appletstore -storepass greenstone

Enter the appropriate details for your organization. When it asks to enter the key password for <privateKey>, choose your own password or hit Enter to use "greenstone".

    jarsigner -keystore appletstore -signedjar SignedGatherer.jar GLI.jar privateKey

When it prompts, enter the password you used above.

To use the GLI applet, (re)start the GS3 web server.

Converting a GS2 collection to GS3 when working with a remote GS3 server

The new Format Conversion Wizard to convert GS2 format statements to GS3 format statements (see this page) only appears when you're working with GLI, not client-GLI. The client-GLI for GS3 will only perform the most basic initial step in the conversion process, which is to preserve the GS2 format statements in inactive XML tags in the new collection's collectionConfig.xml.

However, if you have a local Greenstone 3 installed, you can still manage to convert a remote collection's collect.cfg file to its GS3 equivalent. See here for details.

Important Changes and Bug Fixes

IMPORTANT information

For ease of access this section has been brought across from the 3.07 Release Notes, but not all of it may be relevant to the 3.08 release.

Troubleshooting

When using cross collection search, if you try to view associated files, e.g. PDF files (instead of the Greenstone document) you will get errors like "ERROR: Assoc file paths must now contain the library name". To fix this please edit web/sites/localsite/siteConfig.xml.

Look for

<gsf:template match="documentNode">
	  <xsl:variable name="collname" select="@collection"/>
	  <td><gsf:if-metadata-exists><gsf:metadata name="srclinkFile"/>
<gsf:if><a><xsl:attribute name='href'>sites/localsite/collect/<xsl:value-of select='@collection'/>
/index/assoc/<gsf:metadata name="assocfilepath"/>/<gsf:metadata name="srclinkFile"/>
</xsl:attribute><gsf:choose-metadata><gsf:metadata name="thumbicon"/>
<gsf:metadata name="srcicon"/></gsf:choose-metadata></a></gsf:if></gsf:if-metadata-exists></td>

Add <xsl:value-of select="$library_name"/>/ at the start of the href value, i.e.

<gsf:template match="documentNode">
	  <xsl:variable name="collname" select="@collection"/>
	  <td><gsf:if-metadata-exists><gsf:metadata name="srclinkFile"/>
<gsf:if><a><xsl:attribute name='href'><xsl:value-of select="$library_name"/>/sites/localsite
/collect/<xsl:value-of select='@collection'/>/index/assoc/<gsf:metadata name="assocfilepath"/>
/<gsf:metadata name="srclinkFile"/></xsl:attribute><gsf:choose-metadata>
<gsf:metadata name="thumbicon"/><gsf:metadata name="srcicon"/></gsf:choose-metadata></a></gsf:if></gsf:if-metadata-exists></td>

SIGPIPE errors when building a collection

  1. If your indexer is set to solr, a newer version of the solr extension has been fixed to circumvent a SIGPIPE error caused by a problem in one of Java's HttpURLConnection related classes. You can try one of the following:
    • You could grab a newer version of Greenstone 3. Greenstone 3.09 (still to be released at the time of writing) will contain this fix, as do nightly binaries from http://www.greenstone.org/caveat-emptor/?latest=latest
    • Get a newer version of the solr extension from SVN that contains the fix from http://trac.greenstone.org/browser/gs3-extensions/solr/trunk/src?rev=32088. SVN checkout this folder into the GS3 ext subfolder as solr, after removing the old ext/solr folder. Then use a terminal to go into the ext/solr folder and run ant del-service add-service.
    • Or you can update just the affected files in your solr extension, by following the instructions in the sequence of Greenstone mailing list exchanges with Martín Williman under the subject "SolR bugs".
  2. If your indexer is not solr or if updating the solr extension didn't fix the problem and if your collection is using jdbm as the database type and the error messages surrounding the SIGPIPE mention issues with "transaction commit", then either
    • change the database type to gdbm
    • or leave the database type at jdbm and move your GS3's bundled JRE (the GS3.08's packages/jre subfolder) outside your GS3 installation. Next install a newer Java on your system so that GS3.08 can find that. If on Linux, ensure you open a new terminal before running GLI or command line building your collection.

Many thanks to Martín Williman for 1 and Mariana Pichinini for solution 2.

Ubuntu/Linux perl errors about Bibtex/Latex/MediaWiki plugins or other perl files

This can happen when running GLI or the command line building scripts.

The errors can look like:

Running the Greenstone Librarian Interface...
Version: 2.87

User cache dir: /root/.gli/cache/
Unescaped left brace in regex is deprecated here (and will be fatal in Perl 5.30), passed through in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/(/.*){ <-- HERE ,41}/ at /usr/local/Greenstone/perllib/plugins/DirectoryPlugin.pm line 199.
Unescaped left brace in regex is deprecated here (and will be fatal in Perl 5.30), passed through in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/^(\s*)body(\s*){ <-- HERE (\s*)$/ at /usr/local/Greenstone/perllib/plugins/MediaWikiPlugin.pm line 280.
Unescaped left brace in regex is deprecated here (and will be fatal in Perl 5.30), passed through in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/_content_(\s*){ <-- HERE / at /usr/local/Greenstone/perllib/plugins/MediaWikiPlugin.pm line 506.
...

They're caused by the newer version of perl (that comes installed with newer versions Ubuntu) no longer accepting some older perl syntax.

If you would like to continue using GS3.08, we've patched the affected plugins. The instructions to use the patch are:

0. Exit GLI in the proper manner if it's running.

1. Optional: Back up your GS3.08's gs2build/perllib/plugins and gs2build/perllib/cpan/ folders (so you can restore these folders if the patches below don't work for you).

2. Download the GS308PluginsForNewerPerlUbuntu.tar.gz tarball, which contains the patched up files, from the patches page and extract the tarball's contents.
If you're on a Windows machine, you may want to download the GS308PluginsForNewerPerlUbuntu.zip ZIP file instead and extract that.

3. Five files should have been extracted:

4. Use a new terminal to launch GLI or any commands that previously failed with errors. Hopefully GLI will launch successfully now.

Mac Installer fails

If running the Mac installer results in a message about having failed to copy to /var/folders/zz/ permission denied), then restarting the Mac followed by running the installer once again worked for us, resulting in a successful installation.

Using the command line to reset the admin password when it isn't recognised

If at any stage, your admin password is no longer recognised from the Greenstone Reader interface (the Greenstone pages that you view through the web browser), then you can try to reset your admin password through the command line.

1. On Linux and Mac, open a terminal and use it to navigate to your Greenstone 3 installation folder.

On Windows, you can either open a DOS terminal the usual way and then likewise use it to navigate to your Greenstone 3 installation folder (using the cd command). Or, you could open a Windows File Explorer first and use it to navigate to your Greenstone 3 installation. Then you could easily get a DOS prompt at that File Explorer location, as explained at stackoverflow:

Hold Shift while Right-Clicking a blank space in the desired folder to bring up a more verbose context menu. One of the options is Open Command Window Here. This works in Windows Vista, 7, 8, and 10.

2. Now that your terminal is at the GS3 installation folder, you can type the following command in the terminal:

ant config-admin

4. It will ask for a new admin password. Type the new password and hit enter.

5. Once you restart the server, try out your new password.

Useful information

When you've built a collection of documents, you may discover that there appears to be a copy of all these documents in the collection's import, archives and index subfolders and wonder whether Greenstone could really be so inefficient with space as to keep 3 copies to everything. As it happens though, Greenstone uses hard-links both on Linux and Windows, in order to keep just one set of your documents. Then it simply hardlinks to these, instead of making copies. By default, Windows doesn't show you when files on your filesystem are hard-linked. If you choose to install the Windows extension program Link Shell Extension (LSE), it will put red arrows on files that are hard linked.

Known Issues

Changes to Tomcat port affects Solr collections

Currently when you change your tomcat port (either in build.properties, or using File→Settings in the Server program) the changes won't propagate to Solr which will still try to use the old port number. If you make changes to Tomcat port, please shutdown and restart the server from the Start Menu. If you are starting from within a terminal, you will need to shut down Greenstone and restart it from a fresh terminal.

Web document editor requires perl CGI module

Editing documents through the web interface requires your system perl to have CGI installed. Without CGI, you can edit metadata and save, but your changes won't have been applied. You can tell this is the case by looking at the build log files in the collection, e.g. greenstone3/web/sites/localsite/collect/<collname>/log/build_log.1480553047299.txt. The message might say something like

Document Editor Build 
Command = /bin/perl -S /greenstone/pei-jones/web/WEB-INF/cgi/metadata-server.pl 
Content-type:text/plain

ERROR: Can't locate CGI.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /usr/local/lib64/perl5 /usr/local/share/perl5 /usr/lib64/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/lib64/perl5 /usr/share/perl5 .) at ./gsdlCGI.pm line 9.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at ./gsdlCGI.pm line 9.
Compilation failed in require at (eval 1) line 1.

If you get this error, then please install the CGI module for your system perl.

Work Arounds

Filenames in collections should not contain &, < and >

In order to have better handling of different file and filename encodings, a sacrifice was made of being unable to support &, < and > characters in filenames. Filenames with such characters will make metadata.xml invalid, as a result of which, GLI won't be able to reload the metadata therein.

A workaround is to use "and" in place of "&" in filenames. And either use different characters for < and >, such as [ and ] or ( and ), or leave them out from filenames.

Greenstone applets (Phind, Collage) crash Firefox

See bugzilla report.

If attempting to view a java applet (like Collage or Phind phrase classifiers) crashes Firefox, then make sure you have the Java Applet plugin installed. If it is installed and Firefox is still crashing, then open firefox and visit the page

about:config

Scroll down to the property:

dom.ipc.plugins.java.enabled

Set it to true (rightclick and choose toggle).

PDF to image conversion error on Linux

If you've configured a PDFPlugin to convert PDFs to images, increase the verbosity in Import Options and Build Options to 5 in GLI's Create panel.

When rebuilding the collection, check to see if you encounter the following error message mentioning that 'memory allocation failed', a 'corrupt image' at 'ReadPNGImage' and 'PostScript delegate failed':

import.pl> Converting pdf05-notext.pdf to pagedimg_jpg format
import.pl> calling cmd "/usr/bin/perl" -S gsConvert.pl -verbose 5 -pdf_zoom 2 -errlog "/research/myfolder/gs3-svn-12Sep2013/web/sites/localsite/collect/Enhanced-PDF/tmp/1378957949/err.log" -output pagedimg_jpg "/research/myfolder/gs3-svn-12Sep2013/web/sites/localsite/collect/Enhanced-PDF/tmp/1378957949/pdf05-notext.pdf"
import.pl> Error executing pdfpstoimg.pl
import.pl> pdfpstoimg error log:
import.pl> convert: memory allocation failed `/tmp/magick-31829ofGIFuaNZ1xy1' @ error/png.c/ReadOnePNGImage/2160.
import.pl> convert: corrupt image `/tmp/magick-31829ofGIFuaNZ1xy1' @ error/png.c/ReadPNGImage/3794.
import.pl> convert: Postscript delegate failed `/research/myfolder/gs3-svn-12Sep2013/web/sites/localsite/collect/Enhanced-PDF/tmp/1378957949/pdf05-notext.pdf': No such file or directory @ error/pdf.c/ReadPDFImage/681.
import.pl> convert: no images defined `/research/myfolder/gs3-svn-12Sep2013/web/sites/localsite/collect/Enhanced-PDF/tmp/1378957949/pdf05-notext/pdf05-notext.jpg' @ error/convert.c/ConvertImageCommand/3068.
import.pl> Convert error for /research/myfolder/gs3-svn-12Sep2013/web/sites/localsite/collect/Enhanced-PDF/tmp/1378957949/pdf05-notext.pdf 
import.pl> Could not convert pdf05-notext.pdf to pagedimg_jpg format
import.pl> convert: memory allocation failed `/tmp/magick-31829ofGIFuaNZ1xy1' @ error/png.c/ReadOnePNGImage/2160.
import.pl> convert: corrupt image `/tmp/magick-31829ofGIFuaNZ1xy1' @ error/png.c/ReadPNGImage/3794.
import.pl> convert: Postscript delegate failed `/research/myfolder/gs3-svn-12Sep2013/web/sites/localsite/collect/Enhanced-PDF/tmp/1378957949/pdf05-notext.pdf': No such file or directory @ error/pdf.c/ReadPDFImage/681.
import.pl> convert: no images defined `/research/myfolder/gs3-svn-12Sep2013/web/sites/localsite/collect/Enhanced-PDF/tmp/1378957949/pdf05-notext/pdf05-notext.jpg' @ error/convert.c/ConvertImageCommand/3068.
import.pl> Convert error for /research/myfolder/gs3-svn-12Sep2013/web/sites/localsite/collect/Enhanced-PDF/tmp/1378957949/pdf05-notext.pdf 
import.pl> Converting pdf05-notext.pdf to html format

If you see the above error message, then:

1. Use a text editor to open your Greenstone 3's gs2build/ext/imagemagick/linux/etc/ImageMagick/delegates.xml

2. Find the line that would say:

<delegate decode="ps:alpha" stealth="True" command="&quot;gs&quot; -q -dQUIET -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dNOPROMPT -dMaxBitmap=500000000 -dAlignToPixels=0 -dGridFitTT=2 &quot;-sDEVICE=pngalpha&quot; -dTextAlphaBits=%u -dGraphicsAlphaBits=%u &quot;-r%s&quot; %s &quot;-sOutputFile=%s&quot; &quot;-f%s&quot; &quot;-f%s&quot;"/>

The above specifies the PostScript delegate for PNG images. It has the sDEVICE set to pngalpha.

3. Change the line to:

<delegate decode="ps:alpha" stealth="True" command="&quot;gs&quot; -q -dQUIET -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dNOPROMPT -dMaxBitmap=500000000 -dAlignToPixels=0 -dGridFitTT=2 &quot;-sDEVICE=**pnmraw**&quot; -dTextAlphaBits=%u -dGraphicsAlphaBits=%u &quot;-r%s&quot; %s &quot;-sOutputFile=%s&quot; &quot;-f%s&quot; &quot;-f%s&quot;"/>

The above changes the sDevice to pnmraw.

4. Save the file and re-run the build now.

Updated Translations

Thanks to the following people for new and updated translations since 3.07: