FOSS Experiences and Reflections

For this post, I'll be reflecting about my experience with the installation of a virtual machine, installing a piece of open source software, and my use of that software.

Initially, I downloaded Ubuntu 12 from the Ubuntu site and was going to plug it in to virtualbox. Unfortunately, my virtualbox application is corrupted and cannot uninstall correctly, but there is always vmware. So I used my Ubuntu .iso to start a new virtual machine in vmware. For some reason, vmware cannot detect the Ubuntu .iso and other people have had this issue with no resolution. Rather than sweat over a problem so minor, I just used an old Linux Mint image I still had residing on my computer.

The open source software I will be testing is RMH Homebase. So I downloaded the zip file containing all the information that I need to test RMH Homebase, or so I thought. Looking up more information in the README of RMH Homebase revealed that I would need to install PHP5 and MySQL, among other dependencies. So let's check out some commands:

% sudo apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client
% sudo apt-get install apache2
% sudo apt-get install php5
% sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin

MySQL is required to handle the backend database management. Apache is required to get ahold of a local server instance. PHP5 is required for front-end management. phpmyadmin allows synchronicity between php5 and apache2.

Installing Apache lets you use localhost for local server instances. (http://localhost)

I had to do some navigation and tests to figure out where my localhost files went. /var/www/ is the location to drop files. I created a file "test.php" which loads perfectly fine and gives a blank webpage, which is way better to see than a "We can't find that resource" sort of page. I reloaded the apache server a few times when doing this so I am not particularly certain as to whether or not that that is required to put new files in.

So next I had to move the RMH Homebase (rmh15) files to this /var/www/ directory.

% sudo cp -R ~/Desktop/rmh15 /var/www/

This command will recursively copy all the files from the source to my localhost directory.

When trying to finish the marriage between phpMyAdmin and apache, I stumbled upon a past student's blog from the College of Charleston and it is from there that I found and used this command:

% sudo ln -s /usr/share/phpmyadmin /var/www/phpmyadmin

Logging in to phpMyAdmin was tricky at first as the username is "root" instead of your actual user that you are logged in to, but it makes sense. It seems like I can navigate all the files with phpMyAdmin and view the databases manually or run a SQL query to view information.

I could log straight into the RMH database by navigating to localhost/rmh15/, as well. Following the readme, I was unable to run the dbInstall.php file as directed. The output received when running this is as follows:

Installing Tables...
connected...
database selected...
No database selecteddbWeeks added...
Could not create dbSchedules table: No database selected

So I'm not sure what the problem is, but I will investigate this further soon.

Lastly, I would like to close with remarks about the work on my team project. We have officially chosen Galaxy as our project and I have provided a snippet of our "Project Decision" page from our team wiki. The page uses Ohloh to detail the usage of different languages in open source projects, as well as some summarization points about the project-at-hand.

Music listened to while blogging: Lily Allen & Kanye West