We are pleased to announce that the Windows, GNU/Linux, MacOS and Source
distributions of the finalised Greenstone2.81 are now available for
download from our sourceforge page:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/greenstone or from
http://www.greenstone.org/download

This is the finalised 2.81 release. It includes some bug fixes found in
in 2.81rc2. If you are running a 2.81rc or 2.81rc2 please download and
upgrade to this release. Our response to any mailing list questions
about the 2.81rc or 2.81rc2 releases will simply be to ask you to
upgrade to 2.81 first and see if that fixes the problem.

As always, please report any problems or bugs to the mailing list.

Many of us in the Greenstone Team will be taking leave over Christmas
and throughout January. We wish all list members the best over the
holiday season! An unfortunate side effect is, of course, that our
responses on the mailing list may slow down over that period. We invite
all list members to help each other out during this time - if you know
the answer to a question someone else asks on the list, have confidence
in answering, as it might be a while before one of the Greenstone team
is available to reply.

Happy Holidays,
Oran and the rest of the Greenstone team.

Release Name: 2.81

The Windows, GNU/Linux, Mac OS/X and Source distributions of Greenstone
v2.81
are now available for download from our sourceforge page:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/greenstone

or via

http://www.greenstone.org/download

This is the finalised 2.81 release. It includes some bug fixes found in in
2.81rc2. If you are running a 2.81rc or 2.81rc2 please download and
upgrade to
this release.

Important changes in this release include, in no particular order:

wvWare updated
--------------
We have upgraded the version of wvWare included with Greenstone in the Linux
binary releases to version 1.2.4. It was not possible to do the same for the
MacOS binary distribution without shipping around 80Mb of additional
libraries,
so the MacOS binary release still comes with version 0.7.1. MacOS users may
upgrade wvWare if needed by downloading it from
http://wvware.sourceforge.net/ and compiling it. Source users will also
still get version 0.7.1 but may upgrade in the same way.

The release notes from the 2.81rc2 release and included below:

Release Name: 2.81rc2

The Windows, GNU/Linux, Mac OS/X and Source distributions of Greenstone
v2.81rc2
are now available for download from our sourceforge page:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/greenstone

or via

http://www.greenstone.org/download

Important changes in this release include, in no particular order:

Stability and Bug Fixes
-----------------------
Some small problems in the recent 2.81rc release of Greenstone2 have
been ironed
out to create an overall more robust release. Some features have been
restored
(including realistic books and dynamic classifiers on Windows) and the
LuceneWrapper.jar file has been put back into the release.

GDBM
----
Greenstone now comes with it's own modified version of gdbm which can
auto-detect the format of database files (ldb or bdb format) and load either
format on any of Greenstone's supported platforms. This achieves a
better level
of portability for Greenstone collections, and allows collections built
on one
operating system to be served from other operating systems supported by
Greenstone.

Installer improvements
----------------------
* The new installer:
- is now available in five languages
- can now cope with being executed from a path with accented
characters and
other special characters. (There is still a known issue with chinese
file paths, which can be avoided by simply running from c:\\ or
another path
with no special characters.)
* The source release is now provided as a platform-independent zip / tar
archive
* We now provide a simple binary zip / tar distribution for each platform

Vista Compatibility
-------------------
* When Greenstone is installed into the Program Files directory on Windows
Vista, it is necessary to elevate to a higher access level to run GLI
and the
Greenstone server. As of this release, you can do this by launching the
Start
Menu items as an administrator. Just right-click the item and choose "Run as
Administator", or set "Run as Adminsitrator" in the shortcut properties.
Also, as a way to avoid having to elevate to higher access levels
altogether,
the default installation directory is now inside the current user's home
folder.

* Some Windows Vista users have experienced a problem when perl outputs
warning
messages in front of xml output passed to GLI. The error messages
themselves are
not fatal, but cause the xml to become invalid, resulting in a GLI
crash. GLI
has been modified to ignore these warning messages and thereby keep the
validity
of the xml.

New Start Menu icons and server image
-------------------------------------
Each item in a Greenstone Start Menu group is now has a unique icon so
you can
tell which is which at a glance. We have also added some links to the
wiki and
the Greenstone website for convenience. The old server image has also been
replaced with the new GS2 Server logo.

The release notes from the 2.81rc release and included below:

Release Name: 2.81rc

The Windows, GNU/Linux, Mac OS/X and Source distributions of Greenstone
v2.81rc
are now available for download from our sourceforge page:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/greenstone

or via

http://www.greenstone.org/download

Important changes in this release include, in no particular order:

Installer:
--------------

The Greenstone installer downloads are now created using only open source
software, including Ant Installer (http://antinstaller.sourceforge.net/),
Apache Ant (http://ant.apache.org/), our own search4j (based on launch4j
http://launch4j.sourceforge.net/), and our own Greenstone release kits.

We felt it was essential to move away from our existing, closed-source
installer suite as it was not in the spirit of Greenstone to rely on
proprietary software, and it invited the unnecessary cost of keeping the
suite
up-to-date.

Using only open source software has also given us the freedom to
customise the
user experience of the installers. Where a feature was lacking in one of
the
open source packages, we have enjoyed the ability to "open the hood" and
implement it.

With the development of the Greenstone release kits we are now able to
generate
releases of Greenstone automatically and unattended. This process takes
just
20 minutes, and it has helped us a lot in the development and testing of
new
features of Greenstone. We have been able to set up a feedback loop,
where code
committed one day is included in an automatic nightly snapshot release
made
available for download on our website the next day. Our users have also
benefited from being able to obtain up-to-date snapshot releases of
Greenstone
in between our official releases.

These daily snapshots are available through:

http://www.greenstone.org/snapshots

On Windows, the version number is included in the Start Menu which means
that
multiple installations of Greenstone will have their own entries in the
Start
Menu. The installer no longer writes to the registry, so installation no
longer requires administrator privileges.

ImageMagick is now bundled with Greenstone for binary web releases for all
platforms (previously it was only provided on a CD-ROM release) and
includes
JPEG2000 support. The installer offers the option to install this or not.
You can skip installing it if you already have ImageMagick previously
installed.

Ghostscript is now bundled with Greenstone for binary web releases for
Windows
and Mac. The installer offers the option to install this or not. You can
skip installing it if you already have Ghostscript previously installed.

Importing and Plugin Changes:
------------------------------

Plugin Restructuring: The plugins have been restructured. This has been
done
mostly for coding efficiency. The most noticeable change is that plugins
have
been renamed. xxxPlug now becomes xxxPlugin, and some have also had
their names
modified or expanded to be clearer. For example, DBPlug is now
DatabasePlugin,
PPTPlug is PowerPointPlugin. The complete list of new plugins can be
seen at
http://wiki.greenstone.org/wiki/index.php/Plugins. Old collections should
still build okay in GLI, which will map the old plugin names to the new
ones.
Command line building should also work, but the configuration file won't be
altered to use the new names.

A lot of work has been done trying to get Greenstone to work properly with
non-ascii filenames. Two versions of the filename are stored, [Source] for
displaying the filename, and [SourceFile] for linking to the file from a web
page.

The -smart\_block option (most commonly seen with HTMLPlugin) has been
deprecated
. Instead we have a first pass through the documents to find out which ones
should be blocked.

MARCPlugin and MARCXMLPlugin can now map metadata to Qualified Dublin
Core as
well as Dublin Core.

MARCXMLPlugin now assigns metadata from metadata.xml files.

EMAILPlugin now saves binary attachments as binary files on Windows

ImagePlugin and PagedImagePlugin now offer the -cache\_generated\_images
option
to prevent thumbnails and screenview images being recreated each import.

OAIPlugin saves the metadata as Dublin Core rather than moving it all to
the ex
metadata set. This means that it won't show up in the GLI unless the
files are
exploded. Exploding is now available for OAI records.

ProCitePlugin no longer uses the pc namespace. Metadata is stored using the
field names set in the workform definition, rather than using Field1Name
and
Field1Value etc..

-reversesort option to import.pl to be used with -sortmeta option to
sort in
reverse order.

Tidied up OID generation. OIDtype and OIDmetadata options are now available
for each plugin as well as globally from import.pl. Hashing usually
occurs on
the original file, but some plugins specify that hashing should be done
on the
Greenstone XML document.

Building and Indexing Changes:
-------------------------------

Improvements to Lucene incremental building. Lucene document identifiers
now
match Greenstone identifiers, rather than 1, 2, 3, thanks to DL Consulting.
This improves search efficiency, and is another step towards true
incremental
building. Rebuilding with no new documents shouldn't break the index.

MGPP and Lucene building tidied up. 'allfields' now means combined
searching
over all specified indexes (not all document metadata) for both mgpp and
lucene.
'metadata' will index all metadata, but no longer reindexes metadata
that has
already been specified. MGPP indexing over combined fields now works
properly.

New collection configuration file option: infodbtype. Values include
gdbm (the
default), gdbm-txtgz, sqlite, mssql. This specifies what database system
to use
for the collection metadata database. Currently this needs to be added to
collect.cfg by hand, as it is not available in GLI yet.

gdbm: the default, and is what has always been used previously. This is
platform dependent. It transfers between Windows and Linux, but not
to/from a
Mac.

gdbm-txtgz: A gzipped text version of the database. At runtime, the
first time
this collection is accessed, it will be unpacked and converted to the
appropriate GDBM database using txt2db. This is a good choice if you are
creating a collection to be used on another operating system, especially if
one or more of those operating systems is a Mac.

sqlite: Platform independent database using SQLite. The new dynamic
classifiers
can be used with this database. Thanks to DL Consulting.

mssql: Windows specific database using MS SQL Server. See
http://wiki.greenstone.org/wiki/index.php/Using\_MSSQL\_for\_Collection\_Database

for information about how to set this up. The new dynamic classifiers
can be used with this database. Thanks to DL Consulting.

Depositor:
------------

Collection editing using the Depositor is now enabled by default for the
admin
user.

The metadata fields offered for each document can now easily be customised
from the GLI.

By default, the depositor will import and build each document into the
collection when it is added. It can now be easily set up to just "deposit"
the item without rebuilding.

See http://wiki.greenstone.org/wiki/index.php/How\_to\_use\_the\_depositor for
more information.

GLI
-------

A new right-click file option for binary files that go through a conversion
process to be imported, such as PDF, Word and PowerPoint files. "Replace
source
document with HTML" will convert the original file to HTML and replace
it in
the collection. This means that the converted HTML (which may be
unattractive)
can now be modified in the collection. This is available for Remote GLI too.

A new right-click file option on the collection tree background to
refresh the
file view. This is useful if you have manually added files to the
collection
outside of GLI.

MetadataXMLPlugin has been moved 'below the line' in the Plugins panel so
cannot be removed in GLI. If you are using GLI to add metadata, then you
need
this plugin.

The Export As option now only exports one collection at a time. Collections
can be exported as GreenstoneMETS, FedoraMETS, MARCXML and DSpace archive.

'NavigationBar pulldown' added to the list of format options - this
makes the
navigation 'bar' a drop down list instead of a bar across the page.

Lots of work done on making the Download panel work better, including
getting
download processes to terminate when they are cancelled or when GLI is
closed
while they are still running.

New panel under the Format tab, "Depositor Metadata" which allows
customisation of which metadata fields should be offered in the
depositor for
that collection.

CJK segmentation option has been added to GLI. This doesn't do proper word
segmentation, but adds a space in between each CJK character. The character
ranges have been expanded to work with Japanese and Korean. It is
applied to
metadata as well as document text.

Another new feature in Greenstone v2.81 is the ability to schedule the
automatic rebuilding of a greenstone collection using the GLI. There's a new
panel under the Create tab allowing the scheduling of automatic collection
rebuilding. Scheduling will require some configuration in order for it
to work.
The following link has more information on how to do this for each platform:
http://wiki.greenstone.org/wiki/index.php/Scheduled\_Collection\_Building\_from\_the\_Librarian\_Interface

Greenstone Runtime:
----------------------
New dynamic classifiers (if the collection uses sqlite or MSSQL as the
collection database). These are generated at runtime so do not require the
collection to be rebuilt for classifier changes. Another step towards true
incremental building. See
http://wiki.greenstone.org/wiki/index.php/More\_about\_classifiers#How\_do\_I\_use\_dynamic\_classifiers.3F

for more information. Thanks to DL Consulting.

Large code restructuring. Code is split between common-src, build-src and
runtime-src. Makes it easer to use code in other projets, such as
Greenstone 3
and running Greenstone on an iPhone/iPod Touch.

External links now default to going straight to the web page, rather than
showing a warning page first.

Improvements to the oaiserver, thanks to DL Consulting. Resumption token
support has been added, and it now validates against online validation
tools.

Greenstone now compiles for Linux on 64-bit platforms. All programs are
compiled natively for 64-bit, except for those that rely on mg/mgpp, which
still need to be 32-bit compiled. As part of the configure/make
process, the
correct flags are automatically set, so from the developers point of
view you
compile up Greenstone on a 64-bit machine the exact same way you do for any
other Unix-based system.

Greenstone should now compile with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, thanks
to DL
Consulting.

FLI - Fedora Librarian Interface
---------------------------------

The Fedora Librarian Interface (FLI) is very much like GLI in that it
allows
you to gather together your documents. It then uses Greenstone's ability to
convert documents into the FedoraMETS format so that these can be ingested
(put into) a Fedora repository. The process of building a collection
using FLI
exports documents into a repository maintained by a Fedora server rather
than
one maintained by Greenstone. In order to use FLI, you will need to have
Fedora installed. More information on how to install Fedora and set it up
to work with FLI, and how to run FLI itself, can be found in the documents:

1. Installing Fedora (2.2.1/3.0) and Fedora-related information
http://wiki.greenstone.org/wiki/index.php/InstallingFedora

2. Installing Fedora Generic Search (to provide full-text indexing and
searching capabilities for a Fedora repository)
http://wiki.greenstone.org/wiki/index.php/InstallingFedoraGSearch

3. Running FLI, the Fedora Librarian Interface
http://wiki.greenstone.org/wiki/index.php/RunningFLI

Translations:
--------------

Thanks to:

John Rose, for help with English GLI help, French translations for GLI and
Greenstone.
Maxime Rouast for Greenstone French translations
Celine Guimbertaud for GLI French translations
Yohannes Mulugeta and Abiyot Bayou for Greenstone Amharic translations
Kamal Salih for GLI Arabic translations
Gerhard Riesthuis for Greenstone Dutch translations
Mohan Raj Pradhan for GLI Nepali translations.
Diego Spano for translating the installer's interface into Spanish.
Xiaofeng Yu for translating the installer's interface into Mandarin.
Doris Jung for translating the installer's interface into German.

...and many other minor improvements and bug fixes

We want to ensure that Greenstone works well for you. Please report any
problems to the Greenstone mailing list
greenstone-users@list.scms.waikato.ac.nz.

[DL Consulting (http://www.dlconsulting.com) are the world's leading
suppliers
of commercial consulting, customization, support, maintenance and hosting
services for the Greenstone digital library software suite.]