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Greenstone 3.09 Release Notes

Release Name: 3.09

Release Date: unknown

Installation Instructions

Installing and running the binary release

  • Download the appropriate binary release for your operating system and run it.
  • Note to Mac users: The security settings in newer Mac OS versions have been altered to by default disallow users from casually opening and running .dmg executables that are not from Apple itself. When attempting to open the Greenstone binary .dmg file, if it pops up an error warning about security, you will need to set up the Security on your Mac to allow you to run .dmg files downloaded from the internet. Otherwise the Greenstone mac binary will not run. To do this, Go to your Mac's System Preferences. Under "Personal", select Security & Privacy. In the General tab, tick "Allow apps downloaded from Anywhere", then confirm that you want to "Allow From Anywhere". You'll need to be admin to do this, otherwise click on the padlock at the bottom left of the Security & Privacy tab and log in as admin.
  • For Linux, you will need to set the file to be executable before running it. (e.g. chmod a+x Greenstone-3.09-linux)
    • The installer initially unpacks into a temporary directory (/tmp on linux). If you wish to change this, set the TMPDIR environment variable.

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

 export TMPDIR=/something/else
 ./Greenstone-3.09-linux

Use the following instead

 TMPDIR=/something/else ./Greenstone-3.09-linux

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

  • Folder where you want greenstone3 to be installed.
  • Choosing which packages to install.
    • Greenstone3 will install the Apache Tomcat webserver by default. You can choose not to install it, but then you will need to set up your own version of Tomcat to serve Greenstone. We recommend using Greenstone's Tomcat, at least initially while you get everything set up.
    • ImageMagick is bundled with Greenstone for binary web releases for all platforms, and includes JPEG2000 support. You can choose not to install it if you already have ImageMagick previously installed.
    • Ghostscript is now bundled with Greenstone for binary web releases for Windows and Mac. You can choose not to install it if you already have Ghostscript previously installed.
  • Choosing a password for the administration pages. These pages allow the admin user to inspect and manage the list of registered Greenstone users. You can add new users, and change group settings for existing users. Greenstone user registration is needed if you want to use remote GLI login to the Greenstone server, or if you want to make collections/documents only accessible by certain groups of users. (If the password is not set during installation, the default password for the 'admin' user is 'admin'. You can change the password any time after installation, by running the Greenstone 3 server and visiting the Administration pages. See below).

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 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"

  • check that the Java run-time is installed and on the webserver's path. If you get a "500 Internal Server Error", check the error log of your webserver for the cause (greenstone3/web/logs/greenstone.log).
  • consult the more detailed instructions on the Remote Greenstone page for further steps that may be necessary to carry out.

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 Java Web Start application (replacement for GLI Applet) - Additional Steps

Many browsers have stopped supporting Java applets, while Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and perhaps Microsoft Edge, still support it. For this reason, 3.09's GLI is now no longer provided as an applet, but has been converted into a Java Web Start application.

Instructions for using the GLI Java Web Start, which works over the JNLP protocol, are below.

  1. First follow the instructions above for setting up the Remote GS Server
  2. Next, generate the SignedGatherer.jar:
    • Use a terminal to go into the Greenstone "gli" directory, then run
          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".

    • Next, run
          jarsigner -keystore appletstore -signedjar SignedGatherer.jar GLI.jar privateKey

When it prompts, enter the password you used above.

  1. Move the created SignedGatherer.jar file from the gli directory into GS3's web/applet subdirectory.
  2. You need to associate JNLP files with Java Web Start (jre/bin/javaws).
    • On Windows, create the association in the usual way: when you first access the GLI Web Start application through Greenstone, a JNLP file called "GLIappWebStart.jnlp" will be offered for launching or download. If JavaWS is not already the default application to open JNLP files with, rightclick on the downloaded GLIappWebStart.jnlp file and choose Launch/Open with …. Browse to your Greenstone3's packages/jre/bin/javaws.exe or any installed Java's jre/bin/javaws.exe to use Java's Web Start application as the launcher.
    • For Linux, create a file with .desktop extension (e.g. "javawebstart.desktop") containing the following and save this file into ~/.local/share/applications:
      # This file makes Ubuntu associate .jnlp files with Java Web Start (javaws)
      # This file should be adjusted and then copied into ~/.local/share/applications
      # as a file with .desktop extension, e.g. javawebstart.desktop
      # https://askubuntu.com/questions/235861/how-to-associate-jnlp-file-with-javaws
      [Desktop Entry]
      Encoding=UTF-8
      Name=Java 7 Web Start
      Comment=Java 7 Web Start
      Exec=/home/greenstone/Desktop/linux/jre/bin/javaws %u
      Terminal=false
      Type=Application
      Icon=javaws
      Categories=Application;Network;
      MimeType=application/x-java-jnlp-file;
  3. Launch the Java Control Panel by running jre/bin/javacpl.exe on Windows or jre/bin/ControlPanel on Linux. (GS3 binaries now include a JRE in the packages folder if you want to use the bundled JRE.) In the Java Control Panel, go to the Security tab, set Security level to High if not already set. Click Edit Site List, and then press Add to add the host:port that the GS3 will run on. Remember, to be accessible to the outside world, the host can't be "localhost", but would be the hostname of your machine or public IP.
  4. Once the GS3 code is compiled up, start up the GS3 web server and visit your DL library home page, http://[hostname]:8383/greenstone3/library.
  5. Since you have set up the JNLP file association in a previous step, you can now click on the "The Librarian Interface" link and your browser should offer to save or launch a file called GLIapplet.jnlp. If the browser is able to successfully launch it, Java Web Start will be used to run the GLI application indicated by the JNLP file. If launching through the browser is not possible, then choose to save the JNLP file. It will download the file to a temporary user area (like C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Temp on windows). And then you can rightclick on the downloaded GLIappWebStart.jnlp file, to launch it with the Java Web Start program you already associated with this file type.
  6. After authorising the GLI to run, the JNLP version of the GLI Applet will eventually run and behave like the usual client-GLI (and like the old GLI applet) from this point onward.

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 3.08 Release Notes, but not all of it may be relevant to the 3.09 release.

Troubleshooting

Firefox browser doesn't remember you being logged into greenstone

If you're on firefox and you just logged in to to a running Greenstone 3 digital library (DL), but visiting subsequent pages in the DL shows you that it has forgotten you're logged in, then you're probably encountering a restriction that your firefox browser has.

NOTE: We've encountered this problem on Firefox and only for http URLs that use the domain/machine host name for the tomcat.server property, whereas https URLs worked fine in remembering Greenstone logins, as did http URLs using localhost/127.0.0.1.

To confirm that it only happens on firefox, try another browser first. For instance, Chrome. If your being logged in is being remembered on Chrome, then you've confirmed that the phenomenon is firefox-specific.

Things to try:

  • Close all tabs in firefox and restart firefox in the usual way. Try logging in and visiting other pages to see if it remembers your login now.
  • If that made no difference, try launching a Private Window (Ctrl + Shift + P on firefox), visit your GS3 digital library and login again, then check whether it's being remembered across Greenstone pages now.
  • If that also made no difference then the most likely cause is Firefox plugins or extensions or addons, or maybe its hardware acceleration feature needs to be switched off. To find out if any of this is the case, quit firefox once more by first close all tabs in firefox and quit it. Then try re-launching Firefox in Safe Mode as explained at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1213229
Start Firefox in Safe Mode by holding down the <Shift> (Mac=Options) key, and then starting Firefox.
A small dialog should appear. Click Start In Safe Mode (not Refresh). Is the problem still there?

(If that doesn't work on Linux, firefox can be launched in safe mode from a terminal by typing firefox -safe-mode.)

After relaunching Firefox in Safe Mode, test whether your login details are being remembered this time. If it works now, it could indeed be an addon/extension/plugin or the hardware acceleration feature. Follow the suggestions and instructions at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1213229 and https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/forum-response-disable-hardware-acceleration to narrow down which of these it is.

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 3.09:

en/release/3.09_release_notes.1536807600.txt.gz · Last modified: 2018/09/13 03:00 by anupama