[ic] New.. and already I'm going to be a pain :(

Davor Ocelic docelic at mail.inet.hr
Sat Dec 22 18:01:13 EST 2007


On Sat, Dec 22, 2007 at 03:03:26PM -0700, John Halvy wrote:
> - I'm making progress tho  :)  ... but I need to know how to correctly undo, delete or otherwise fix my test catalog.  I read in one of the notes that you should not 'over' write  (ie. do a makecat) on top of your current one.  This needs to be clarified if possible because I know you are aloud as many catalogs as you want.. so how would i just either make another one in addition to the one I have, or otherwise delete/overwrite the one I have?

Interchange asked you for the "base" catalog directory.. For example,
if you chose directory "/catalogs", then actual catalogs named one, two and
three would be under /catalogs/one, /catalogs/two and /catalogs/three.

This can vary, depending on what you typed in. In any case, each catalog
you created was registered with one line in the main interchange.cfg.  
If you find interchange.cfg (it's in interchange installation
directory), open it and you will see something like :

  Catalog one /path/to/one /cgi-bin/ic/one

That means the catalog is in /path/to/one. To delete the catalog, you
would remove the Catalog line from interchange.cfg, then run
rm -rf /path/to/one, and also drop the database that might have been
created (if you used SQL data store).

But there's no need to remove catalogs if you're testing things
out, just create new ones. (To do that, run makecat and pick a new
catalog name.. Like one, two, three, four...)..

> * If someone can just point me to the correct online page that has the answers to some of my questions.. I'd be very happy.  It's just that there are soo many different pages, and I'm so new at this program, that everything seems to blend together sometimes  :(

Yeah, hang in there, it's gonna pay off.

> - When I select a web page document directly (like from my catalog) with my browser (whether IC is running or not, I get some pages that are 'jumbled'.. ie. they have some unintelligible data on it.. mostly html or other various 'coding' that is bleeding though the page.  What could that be from?

Are you opening /path/to/one/index.html in your browser? That won't work
of course. You need to open http://localhost/cgi-bin/ic/one/index.html .

If it's not that, then you need to provide more information, as it is
not clear what is going on.

The other thing may be that you *are* accessing the site over http://, 
but not going through the CGI link program, or did not configure CGI
properly.

> - Placement of the cgi (directory).. and everything else actually. Do I 'just' select where these are (or where I will have them).. and then point IC to them.  Or is there one place that IC 'expects', or is 'better' for them to be?  

There's no expected or better directory. Usually though, your CGI
directory is /usr/lib/cgi-bin/ or /var/cgi-bin/ or something like that,
and you provide that.

You can specify any directory you want, but if it's something
non-standard then you need to adjust Apache configuration to 
treat your custom location as cgi-bin directory.

> - Is there a version of IC and OS (like an older Red Hat or whatever) that is easier to install, learn and work with in the beginning that v 5.5? 

Well, you can view online demos. (http://www.icdevgroup.org/i/dev/demo).

If you want to really install Interchange on your system, then you can
use Red Hat or Debian packages, depending on whether you'd find them
easier than tarball installations.

In any case, the problems you're having are not related to Interchange,
but more to the overall familiarity with Unix and standard network
services (web etc..), so by pushing through this and getting it working,
you'll also pick up some generally useful knowledge.

> ** Again, if it is easier for someone to just tell me that I should run makecat again, or point me to the online docs (or name of the doc), that would be more than enough help!  

Yes, run makecat again and choose a new name to create a new catalog.
Repeat until you get one working.

You can also try going with clean and simple Interchange catalogs that
you can build from scratch. (So without using makecat and installing
full-blown catalogs like Foundation or Standard).

For instructions on that (simple catalogs from scratch), see Interchange
Catalog Tutorial at

  http://www.icdevgroup.org/docs/iccattut.html

> Also I have apache2 up, with php4, ssl and cgi all working (or at least I don't get an error message  ;)

Cool, but you don't need php4 with Interchange ;)

Cya,
-doc


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