Anu’s blog entry for the week ending 11 Nov 2011
As several people had encountered issues in the recent 2.85 release, a lot of this week was spent looking at them so that we can get 2.86 out as soon as possible.
The bugs and oversights are not fatal and work-arounds are possible:
1) If you don’t have the PDF-box extension for Greenstone installed already, GLI will suggest where it can be obtained from. However, the URL it provides points to an olderversion of the PDF-box extension, which happens to be one that’s not functional. If you want the version of PDF-Box that works with 2.85, get it from
http://trac.greenstone.org/browser/main/tags/2.85/gs2-extensions/pdf-box/trunk/pdf-box-java.tar.gz
or http://trac.greenstone.org/browser/main/tags/2.85/gs2-extensions/pdf-box/trunk/pdf-box-java.zip
2)Â The Greenstone demo collection in 2.85 contains HTML files that can’t get converted into XML properly enough to work well with the flash file generated by the Realistic Book feature. So if you’re thinking of testing out the realistic book option of the HTMLPlugin against the HTML files included in the Greenstone demo collection, rather than against your own HTML files, get the improved demo collection from SVN at http://svn.greenstone.org/main/trunk/greenstone2/collect/demo
3) On Vista, if your Greenstone is installed in a path containing brackets, such as “Program Files (x86)” as can happen on Windows 7 machines, then launching Greenstone is likely to fail. On Windows, spaces in Greenstone’s installation path are okay, but brackets aren’t handled well-enough yet. This will be fixed in a future release of Greenstone 2.
4) The fourth bug is more serious in that there is no work-around. It was found by a member on the mailing list when he was using the Datelist Classifier and discovered that references to [ex.srclink] or [srclink] in his Format statements did not get resolved to the URL of the source file. (However, the default browsing classifiers had no problem with such Format statements and would display the correct URL.) This has now been fixed by Dr Bainbridge and will be present in the next release of Greenstone.
5) Another discovery made is that Ubuntu now seems to have a problem with the open-office extension. This was not the case some two months back when, after a bugfix, the extension was tested on the Ubuntu both here and by another dedicated member of the Greenstone family on his own Ubuntu. However, the new problem has been confirmed to now exist, including when run from the commandline, and even older versions of the Greenstone extension are performing similarly despite having worked at one point. Perhaps this has something to do with updates on the Ubuntu, but we’ll be investigating it further.
RSS 2.0
November 22nd, 2011 at 9:19 am
2.85 has a serious bug that is preventing distribution of my collection. The OLD 2001 setup.exe in the windows folder will not work on a Windows 7 64 bit machine. When you use the export your collection to a DVD procedure it includes this old 2001 setup.exe file. This setup file simply will not work on modern Windows software. In fact the Windows folder contains a number of old programs that you should consider updating. I include a list below but for sure the 2001 setup.exe needs to be replaced before Greenstone will work on modern 64 bit software. I think it is dangerous for a developer to leave these old programs in their software if newer ones are available. No telling what evil lurks in the bowels of these OLD files as I found out with Windows 7 64 bit.
setup.exe 4/19/2001
setpw.exe 5/17/2001
tar.exe 10/10/2001
unzip.exe 10/10/2001
bunzip2.exe 10/10/2001
bzip2.exe 10/10/2001
gunzip.exe 10/10/2001
gzip.exe 10/11/2001
pdftohtml.exe 7/2/2004
pptextract.exe 9/23/2005
pptextract.frm 9/23/2005
pptextract.vbp 9/23/2005
pptextract.vbw 9/23/2005