alfresco integration

[Craig White]

Les asked...

> ...and please post a summary if you get this and the
> Staroffice/lucene 
> search working.
----
Alfresco setup has been shall I say, interesting.

Obviously the war setup complicates things because it assumes that you
have a working setup of tomcat and can make your way around things...I
didn't and I probably would have saved myself some amount of grief by
getting the integrated tarball.

Also, my setup is on CentOS-5 and not Fedora though I really doubt that
it would have changed things. I'll have to post some notes back to R J
Day for his wiki...

I installed Xvfb (again, remember, this was CentOS-5)
xorg-x11-server-Xvfb-1.1.1-48.26.el5

Anyway, I installed OpenOffice 2.3.1 from download...
OOo_2.3.1_LinuxIntel_install_en-US.tar.gz

This installed OpenOffice.org in /opt which was fine.

I have a SysV startup script for getting things rolling...

# cat /etc/init.d/oo_headless
#!/bin/bash

# Boot open office so that Alfresco can do transforms.
# chkconfig: 2345 55 25
# description: OpenOffice Headless
#
# processname: soffice

# source function library
. /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions

RETVAL=0

VDISPLAY='99'
SOFFICE_PATH='/opt/openoffice.org2.3/program'
SOFFICE_ARGS1="-nofirststartwizard -nologo -headless -display :$VDISPLAY
"
SOFFICE_ARGS2='-accept=socket,host=localhost,port=8100;urp;StarOffice.ServiceManager'
SOFFICE_PIDFILE=/var/run/soffice.bin.pid

XVFB=/usr/bin/Xvfb
XVFB_ARGS=":$VDISPLAY -screen 0 800x600x8 -fbdir /var/run"
XVFB_PIDFILE=/var/run/xvfb.pid
start_soffice() {
       echo -n $"Starting OpenOffice"
       $SOFFICE_PATH/soffice $SOFFICE_ARGS1 $SOFFICE_ARGS2 >/dev/null
2>&1 &
       [ $? -eq 0 ] && echo_success || echo_failure
       pidof soffice.bin > $SOFFICE_PIDFILE
       echo
}
start_xvfb() {
       echo -n $"Starting Xvfb"
       $XVFB $XVFB_ARGS >/dev/null 2>&1 &
       [ $? -eq 0 ] && success || failure
       pidofproc Xvfb > $XVFB_PIDFILE
       echo
}
start() {
       start_xvfb
       sleep 3
       start_soffice
}
stop() {
       echo -n $"Stopping OpenOffice"
       killproc soffice.bin
       echo
       echo -n $"Stopping Xvfb"
       killproc Xvfb
       echo
}
case "$1" in
       start)
               start
               ;;
       stop)
               stop
               ;;
       restart)
               stop
               start
               ;;
       *)
               echo $"Usage: $0 {start|stop|restart}"
esac

This seems to satisfy some things because I can upload Microsoft Word
documents and convert them to ODF (ODT) and to PDF just fine.

I get an error if I try to take a .DOC or ODT file and 'run action' to
convert it to XML...error claims, No transformation exists between
mimetypes application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text and text/xml but I
suspect that is something that can be fixed in configuration
(somewhere).

If I try to edit a .DOC or .ODT inline, I get binary garbage (perhaps
there is no way around that).

Even though I have installed alfrescoext-0.91.xpi extension into
firefox-1.5.0.12-6.el5.centos I cannot view .DOC or .ODT in a web page,
it only offers to download (yes, I have restarted firefox).

I haven't fooled with Lucene (search) yet but I suspect that your asking
means that you have had issues there too.

Lastly, and this is a biggie and really sucked large amounts of my
time...Authentication setup with LDAP is not very compatible with CIFS
and I have gotten around this by adding NTLM, this causes other issues
(like I can't delete users). I find the reliance upon forums (I can't
find any mail lists or IRC links on their website) to be frustrating to
say the least.

Craig