Table of Contents

Greenstone 3.11 Release notes

This release's key feature is WebSwing GLI, which is GLI running direct from your web browser. See the section Important changes.

This page may undergo further updates until the Greenstone 3.11 release and possibly for some time after. So continue to consult this page for the latest version of the 3.11 release notes.

Release Name: 3.11

Release Date: 14 August 2023

Released:

Release Candidate History

GS3.11rc1 unknowns on Mac Monterey:

As ever, our thanks to our TSG (tech support) who made this and all Greenstone releases possible.

Installation Instructions

Installing and running the binary release

Mac OS Notes

  1. Double click the downloaded dmg file to mount it. The click the Volume image to open it - it will display the Greenstone installer .app.
  2. Ctrl+click (the Mac rightclick) and choose Open (or Open With?) to launch this installer .app
  3. REPEAT: This second time you try to Ctrl+click and choose Open to launch the installer .app inside the .dmg Mac binary file, the Mac will provide a buttonlink to allow you to "open anyway" and run the installer .app file in the .dmg. After a brief time the attempt to launch the installer will fail without admin rights, mentioning something about /tmp/jre failing. This is expected. Press Cancel.
  4. Try running this again - if it passes the jre stage, and gets you to the Greenstone installer dialog, then great. If not,
  5. Open a Finder window and navigate to the /tmp folder. (One way to do this, is to launch a terminal through Go > Utilities > Terminal, then type cd /tmp and press Enter. Next type: ./jre_bin to extract the jre file.
  6. Now return to the installer .app file inside the .dmg. Ctrl+click on it and launch the installer once more. This time the launch process will complete and within a minute or so you should see the Greenstone Installer opening dialog appear.

Linux Notes

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

 export TMPDIR=/something/else
 ./Greenstone-3.11-linux

Use the following instead

 TMPDIR=/something/else ./Greenstone-3.11-linux

Windows Notes

Installer options

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

Running Greenstone

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.

On a Mac

You can either

  1. open a terminal, navigate to the folder you installed Greenstone in, and run ./gs3-server.sh
  2. Open Finder. Use menu option Go→Go To Folder, and type in the folder where you installed Greenstone (eg /Users/kjdon/Greenstone3). Then there are 3 round greenstone icons like:
    1. gs3-server - double clicking will start the library server, and open a browser to your library home page
    2. gli - starts the librarian interface, which you can use to build/edit collections.
    3. gems - used for editing metadata sets.

Building Collections

To build collections, run GLI from the Start menu (Windows) or by running gli/gli.sh (gli/gli.bat on windows) in a terminal cd'd to 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

* Refer to Running the installer in text-only mode

Adding source code to a binary release

Installing a source release

Further instructions

Setting up your Greenstone to run over https

The prevalent method of supporting https for tomcat based servers is to have a main apache httpd web server that works with https, then set up a reverse proxy to let apache httpd redirect requests for GS3's tomcat server internally to Greenstone.

Release notes for 3.10 and 3.09 explains how to configure your GS3 to support https without an apache httpd web server and how to automate GS3 to obtain an https certificate for you from the free Certification Authority "Let's Encrypt".

PDF plugin restructuring and the NEW PDFv2Plugin

From GS3.09 onward, GS3 binaries have been including additional tools for converting from PDF to various text/html/image/image+text formats. (For GS2, only the nightly binaries at http://www.greenstone.org/caveat-emptor/?latest=latest will contain these changes.)

The old "PDFPlugin" remains deprecated but continues to be included in GS3.11. For details and instructions see the GS3.10 release notes.

OpenOffice extension

If you have LibreOffice or OpenOffice installed, you can use the OpenOffice extension to process some newer versions of Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents. Refer to the openoffice greenstone extension 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'.

Alternatively, you can set the admin password from the command line. See below.

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.

Webswing GLI replaces the GLI applet and the Remote GS3 server-client-GLI combination

With release 3.11, the Remote Greenstone 3 server, client-GLI and GLI Webstart Application (that replaced the GLI applet) have all been superseded by the new WebSwing GLI feature.

See the 3.10 release notes for the old instructions on setting up a remote GS3 server and the extra steps for getting the GLI Java Web Start application running.

Important Changes and Bug Fixes

cd web/WEB-INF/cgi 
tar xzvf CGIModule.tar.gz
mv CGIModule/* .

IMPORTANT information

For ease of access this section has been brought across from the 3.10 Release Notes and earlier, but not all of it may be relevant to the 3.11 release.

Patches to 3.11

Useful information

Troubleshooting

Your browser doesn't remember you being logged into greenstone

The issue: The following scenario can occur if you set up GS3 with https, and your server.protocols property in build.properties contains both http and https (i.e. you have server.protocols=http,https or server.protocols=https,http).

Switching between visiting your Greenstone 3 digital library (DL) using http and https URLs can result in the http version of the pages not remembering your login details despite you logging in. This can happen if you ever started off with the https version of the URL to a Greenstone3 DL page and then moved to using the http version of your GS3 URL, or if you ever logged in to your GS3 over https and then attempt to log in later using http.

The solution: The solution is to either start a private window if you want to access your GS3 DL pages over http, or to first clear your browser cookies related to your GS3 DL before swapping from https to http.

The cause: Using https causes session cookies to have the secure flag set to true. When a session cookie has the secure flag thus set, non http URLs cannot return that cookie in their subsequent requests to the server. Only https URLs can. See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Cookies section "Secure and HttpOnly cookies" which states "A secure cookie is only sent to the server with an encrypted request over the HTTPS protocol" and https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2321224/cookie-across-http-and-https-in-php
It further seems that in http mode, the browser does not want to overwrite secure cookies created in https mode with new cookies sent by the server when using http mode. Thus after using https and acquiring secure session cookies, the server can no longer track a user's session when they switch to http until the cookies are cleared either explicitly or through opening a private window.

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.

Known Issues

Java 8.0.362 issues

We have found issues when running GLI using update 362 of Java 8. (These may occur with other updates). These are: errors when cancelling a build; GLI hanging when you add a new file type into a collection and add in the suggested new plugin. If you encounter this, please upgrade your Java 8 to the latest update (was 382 at the time of testing). Note, we bundle Java 8 update 301 with the release, which doesn't have these 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

Note: Greenstone 3.11rc1 and onwards should not exhibit CGIModule related perl issues, as 3.11rc1 and later will install the CGIModule if the perl on your system is version 5.22 or later. However, should you nevertheless encounter perl error messages about CGI.pm being missing, this section could be of help:

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

We believe we've fixed the following issue in all instances where it may show up, but should you at any point encounter an error message as below

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.

CGI.pm is not included with versions of perl from 5.22 and onwards, which is when this issue can result.

In such a case:

cd web/WEB-INF/cgi 
tar xzvf CGIModule.tar.gz
mv CGIModule/* .

If you don't have web/WEB-INF/cgi/CGIModule.tar.gz in your installation, please install the CGI module for your system perl or try grabbing our prepared version from here and de-compressing it and moving its contents into web/WEB-INF/cgi.

Work Arounds

Clicking a search result doesn't properly load the page nor take you to the search term when using old browsers

Problem: When you've found some document page(s) wherein a search term you searched for occurs, and clicking on such a document tries to load the document page but not sufficiently and doesn't take you to the section where the search term occurs.

For those who know to inspect the browser's JavaScript console, they may see errors pointing to lines in a Greenstone JavaScript file called utility_scripts.js.

Context: We've noticed this problem happens for us when using at least Firefox 45 and older.

Cause: The use of the const keyword is not supported by the browsser. This happened for us even in Firefox version 45, despite const support being reported as available in older Firefox versions per https://caniuse.com/const

Solution:

  1. Put it into your GS3's web/interfaces/default/js folder
  2. Rename the existing utility_scripts.js file already present there to utility_scripts.js_orig
  3. Rename the newly downloaded utility_scripts.js_constToVar to utility_scripts.js

Using filenames containing &, < and > in GS3.11 collections

The Enrich panel in GS3.11's GLI is better able to handle

  1. &, < and >
  2. and other non-basic ASCII characters.

When you create a collection and assign it metadata in GLI that contains such characters, GLI will now successfully preserve them between GLI sessions.

The second set of characters listed above are still not recommended for use in metadata when dealing with a remote GS3 server, as that has to do with successfully transferring characters from an operating system in one file system encoding on the client side to possibly another operating system using another file system encoding on the GS3 server side.

Beware: It is only GLI's Enrich pane that has been fixed up to support both sets of characters in metadata. No other part of Greenstone has been fixed to cope with these characters, should they likewise struggle with them.

The fix is often in the form of adding hex encoded entities into the metadata.xml file and decoding them back for display in GLI's Enrich pane.

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 3.10: