This week was mostly spent producing test CD versions of 2.84 for Professor Ian Witten. Usually Greenstone CDs are designed so that they can be installed on either Windows, Mac OS, or Linux but due to size constraints (the total size of necessary files was greater than 700MB, which is as much as a standard CD can hold) we were forced to remove that Mac installer as it is unlikely to be necessary in the workshops that Ian will be hosting. Removing the Mac component reduced the size of the ISO to 697MB which was just under the limit. After fixing up a few minor problems with the CD installer it was decided that it would be better if the tutorial sample files were unzipped by default (usually they are compressed in zip format to save space) so that they were more accessible. The problem with this however is that it would have taken us over our 700MB limit.

The documented examples collection (basically a large set of example collections) is usually stored uncompressed on the CD and is copied directly to the Greenstone folder during intallation. It is made up of thousands of small files and we hypothesise that it is one of the biggest contributors to the slow CD installations because of this. By compressing the documented examples into a single file and uncompressing it on installation we can both save space and (potentially) increase the speed of installations. After implementing this (and having the tutorial sample files unzipped) the CD size was reduced to about 650MB which may be enough to reintroduce the Mac installer, we will have to wait till next week to find out.

I have also added authentication pages to the new Greenstone 3 skin (these existed in the old default skin but not in the new skin. Next week I plan to produce a final version of the CD and continue work on Greenstone 3.

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