This document guides you through the process of installing LON-CAPA on a Fedora Core 3 (FC3) system. Information about Fedora is available from http://fedora.redhat.com/. More information about LON-CAPA is available from http://www.loncapa.org and http://install.loncapa.org.
These instructions assume you have installed Fedora Core 3 on your system and it is running properly. All of the LON-CAPA data is stored in /home/httpd. MySQL is used to store temporary caches of system data, by default this uses storage space in /var/lib/mysql. You will want to be sure you have enough disk space for these two partitions.
Please keep your system up to date. By default, LON-CAPA will add its own repository to your /etc/yum.conf file. Additionally, yum will be run every morning to determine if there are any packages which need to be upgraded. If there are, an email will be sent to the server administrator (specified in the LON-CAPA installation). It behooves you to keep your system up to date.
The installation must be done as root.
The installation process takes the following steps:
You will need to copy the loncapa_yum.conf file over the default yum.conf file.
mv /etc/yum.conf /etc/yum.conf.backup cp loncapa_yum.conf /etc/yum.conf
You will need to remove the following packages which conflict with LON-CAPA.
rpm -q -f | grep PACKAGENAMEYou can remove the packages individually using
rpm -e PACKAGENAMEYou will need to remove all of the packages which depend on the ones you are removing. You can remove the associated packages en mass if you are satisfied the prior command selected all the appropriate packages:
rpm -q -a | grep PACKAGENAME | rpm -e
We have provided many of the packages needed for LON-CAPA in the installation bundle. They reside in the prerequisites directory. You will need to install them using the following commands:
cd prerequisites rpm -Uvh *rpmYou will need to resolve any errors this process generated. For packages that are already installed you can simply remove them from the directory:
mv CONFLICTINPACKAGE*.rpm ..And try the installation command again. If there are required packages which have not been installed, these should be found on your Fedora Core 3 installation CDs.
LON-CAPA requires a number of identifying parameters be set in order for it to function at all. Below is a list with descriptions.
To configure and install LON-CAPA, execute the following commands:
cd ~/loncapa_install/ ./install.plYou will need to enter a root password for MySQL. Once this is complete you will need to execute:
cd /root/loncapa-1.3.2 ./UPDATE
You will need to enter the LON-CAPA configuration information you determined in the previous section.
You will need at least one user at your site who has the role of 'domain coordinator'. This user creates accounts for other users and grants them additional privileges. The make_domain_coordinator.pl script invoked below requires that you enter the users password. The password will show in plaintext as you type it. Feel free to use the "passwd username" command to change it later. Replace USERNAME and DOMAIN with an appropriate user name and your domain.
cd /root/loncapa-1.3.2/loncom/build perl make_domain_coordinator.pl USERNAME DOMAIN (WILL PROMPT FOR PASSWORD HERE) mkdir ~USERNAME/public_html chown USERNAME:www ~USERNAME/public_html chmod 0775 ~USERNAME/public_html chmod a+x ~USERNAME
The LON-CAPA network services take a moment to start. Most misconfigurations will be appearant at this step.
/etc/init.d/loncontrol start /etc/init.d/httpd start
If you receive warnings when starting the httpd about missing perl modules, please make sure you followed the instructions in Installing LON-CAPA Dependencies. If you still have errors, please contact the LON-CAPA development team.
Point a web browser at your new machine and log in as the domain coordinator. Congratulations!
If you've followed the steps above and the server doesn't start or you think there's something wrong, please get in touch with the LON-CAPA developers. If there were errors in installation of the dependency RPMs or during the automatic setup, please send us as much information as possible. If some part of this document is unclear please let us know.