[greenstone-devel] Windows -compatible distribution that doesn't require playing withhosts file or using 127.0.0.1? From: Daniel Paul O'Donnell Date: Mon, 04 Jul 2005 18:56:15 -0600

[greenstone-devel] Windows -compatible distribution that doesn't require playing withhosts file or using 127.0.0.1?

From	Daniel Paul O'Donnell
Date	Mon, 04 Jul 2005 18:56:15 -0600
Subject	[greenstone-devel] Windows -compatible distribution that doesn't require playing withhosts file or using 127.0.0.1?
Hello, I've search the archives and googled this issue. I know it is relatively common, but am writing to this list in hopes that somebody knows an elegant solution. We are about to burn a Master CD for publication with a book that uses Greenstone to provide search functionality. The intended audience is medievalists with a computer, i.e. varying technical competence from 0.1 to 10. We have two problems. 1) The first is with the use of IE as the default browser (the project is very standards based and IE doesn't work as well as other browsers; since we recommend against it in our system requirements, we don't want Greenstone to load it as the standard browser. Is there a way of setting up the install so that the local computer browser is the default choice? Since there is a "default" choice in the File menu that appears on the startup screen, it seems to me there must be a way of setting it so that option is checked by default. We just can't figure out how to do it. 2) The second issue has to do with problems with how Greenstone installs in Windows. On XP computers that are connected to networks and receive dynamic IP addresses (at the least), Greenstone builds the wrong address: computer_name.network_name instead of localhost. We've checked the proxies are off following the information in the FAQ (http://www.greenstone.org/cgi-bin/library?e=p-en-faq-utfZz-8&a=p&p=faqrun#18), and we can get the server running from 127.0.0.1 or by editing /WINDOWS/drivers/etc/hosts. The issue is that we can't (necessarily) expect our final users to do this to their systems correctly. Most are going to expect the program to work out of the box. Does anybody know a more elegant solution to this issue? I realise it is quite common (e.g. http://www.sadl.uleth.ca/nz/cgi-bin/library?e=q-000-00---0gsarch--00-0-0--0prompt-10---4----dtx--0-1l--1-en-50---20-about-127--00031-001-1-0utfZz-8-00&a=d&c=gsarch&cl=search&d=s028bb07.017-apps.niwi.knaw.nl ) but it looks to me like it is going to force us to drop an otherwise quite useful adaptation of Greenstone. Does anybody have experience distributing a project with Greenstone to a similar range of users? What did you do about this problem? All solutions will be appreciated. We need to fix this or drop Greenstone this week. -d -- Dr. Daniel Paul O'Donnell Associate Professor of English Director, Digital Medievalist Project University of Lethbridge Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4 vox: +1 (403) 329-2377 fax: +1 (403) 382-7191 URL: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/ Digital Medievalist Project: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/ (@wiglaf)