This weblog is no longer being maintained. All information here has been ported to EclecticEchoes.com. This site (heupel.com/eclectic) remains only for archival purposes.
I got to the point — finally — in the clearing of my office where I could set up a web server to use for testing. I desperately needed to also, what with two projects underway right now. I beheaded the IPCOP machine — I am looking at moving it to a JRex based device — and moved it to make room for another system to set up as the web server, that ideally will also be replaced by a JRex or mini-itx based board. After downloading Fedora from a really fast mirror, I started the install over WinXP. Since I knew this was going to be a web server primarily with a touch of Samba thrown in, I only installed those components (Apache, MySql, Perl, PHP) and a few other packages. After the initial Fedora setup was completed I decapitated the server and ssh’d in from the laptop to begin really setting it up. Testing the out of box setup I did run into one minor problem. I could ping only the network that the server is on. Not the outside and not the other internal network. It seems no default route was set. After setting one up, I was in business and ready to go.
Webmin was the first non-Fedora package to go on. While it’s nice to work in the shell, especially after being Windows bound for so long now, Webmin makes so many of the routine setup and administration chores just drop dead simple to do. For instance, setting up Apache and the multiple virtual servers. After defining global directives, I set the directives and options for one virtual server, then copied it into the 6 that are now on the server. I probably could have done it in about the same time in the shell but using Webmin saved me a lot of keystrokes (even if you add back in the mouse clicks). Once the virtual servers were set up, and MySql had databases and users for each virtual server, I set out to start loading in some of the other packages and CPAN perl modules I knew I would need installed for MovableType, Gallery, etc. and the experimenting I want to do. Everything ran along smooth as silk, until I tried to install CPAN’s Image::Magick, the perl interface to ImageMagick. I had grabbed the ImageMagick 5.5.6 RPM off the Fedora CD and installed it, then cranked into CPAN and started installing number of packages. When I got to Image::Magick the make failed early in. Looking at the results it all cascaded from not being able to find “api.h”. Arghh.
I removed the Fedora rpm and grabbed the current stable rpm from the ImageMagick site. Same problem. Ok fine… I hadn’t installed the source tree and I knew compiling the ImageMagick from source would want a lot of external libraries’ source (Jpeg, Tiff etc…) so that wouldn’t be a great option. Back to the CPAN build files. In the Makefile.PL I discovered the culprit:
PERLMAINCC' => 'gcc -L/home/cristy/ImageMagick-5.5.7/ttf/objs',
One of a couple of places in the 5.5.6 Makefile that point to /home/cristy/.... “cristy” is one of the developers it looks like, but forgot to sanitize the code tree so that it would be replicable on anyone’s system instead of only his. Oh well.
The good news is, after checking and seeing that a bug was reported at CPAN for the module, I headed back to ImageMagick’s site and grabbed the latest development RPM’s (5.5.8). I grabbed the RPM version of the CPAN module as well. Both RPM’s installed without a hitch. Shortly after that Movable Type installed smoothly and reported no missing libraries or perl modules. Off to the races!