HowTo: Install Alfresco on Linux (Sharepoint Alternative)

July 5, 2007 at 8:29 pm | Posted in Alfresco, Linux | 6 Comments

http://www.alfresco.com

Alfresco is the leading open source alternative for enterprise content management. The open source model allows Alfresco to use best-of-breed open source technologies and contributions from the open source community to get higher quality software produced more quickly at much lower cost. Our goal is to not only provide an open source offering but to surpass commercial offerings in terms of features, functionality and benefits to the user community. Alfresco is built by a team of leading members from Documentum® and Interwoven® with 15 years experience in Enterprise Content Management (ECM), including the co-founder of Documentum.

• Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
• Document Management
• Collaboration
• Records Management
• Knowledge Management
• Web Content Management
• Imaging

Alfresco provides a nice package that includes all of the programs you need for using Alfresco on your Linux machine. To download it, visit http://dev.alfresco.com/downloads/ and select the release you want. You will be redirected to the Source Forge download page.

Select the alfresco-<version->linux-community.bin version of the file.

This contains MySQL, Java (JRE), Tomcat and Open Office.

To install simply execute this file. To do so, the following steps will be necessary:

1. Change the permissions on the download so that it can be executed

   chmod a+x ./alfresco-<version->linux-community.bin

2. (Optional) Become root to execute the installer

su (or sudo -s on some platforms that have the super user account disabled by default)

1. Execute the installer

./alfresco-<version->linux-community.bin

Follow the instructions presented by the installer.

You will be asked for a location to install the software. If you skipped the “become root” step above, your home folder is selected by default. If you intend for Alfresco to be run by other users, or start on startup you should change this to a different location. Exit the installer and become root. If you are root, the default of /opt/alfresco-<version> will be selected. If you want to change it, /usr/local/alfresco-<version> will often be another good choice.

You will be asked to provide an initial password for the MySQL database.

You will be prompted for a MySQL port. If you already have a MySQL server on your machine you will need to change this. The quick installer cannot use a pre-existing MySQL installation. Linux Change Database Config has information on how you can change the database once Alfresco has been installed.

You will be asked for the name of the local domain. If your Linux machine is on a Windows Active Directory network, change this to be your local domain. Otherwise, the default of WORKGROUP will normally be fine.

Press “y” and your computer will begin installing Alfresco.

Decide if you want to view the Readme

Press “y” to start Alfresco.

Job done! Wait a few seconds to allow Tomcat to start and fire up your favourite web browser and browse to http://127.0.0.1:8080/alfresco. The first time you use Alfresco, your username will be admin and your password will be admin.

If you receive an error about OpenOffice being unable to open the display:

1. Stop Alfresco by running <install location>/bin/alfrescoctl.sh stop
2. Follow these instructions to register OpenOffice and create a virtual XWindows environment for OpenOffice to run in
3. Start Alfresco by running <install location>/bin/alfrescoctl.sh start

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