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Installation



Check requirements

First of all, check to make sure the following packages are installed on your system:


Required:

Recommended:


Download packages

Go to our Download page and select the package you wish to install. Currently, there is only the whole suite, which integrates the programs Clients, Documents, Journal, Configurator, Letters, DocServer and the central Kumula library, of course.

In the future, these applications may be split into separate packages, e.g. a base package, an office package and an accounting package.




Extracting the files

Unzip and untar the downloaded package(s). You can install them wherever you want, e.g. at "/opt/kumula" or your home directory. After extracting the Suite, you should have the sub-directories "lib" and "graphics", both are needed for the library. The Kumula apps use the sub-directories "bin", "doc", "i18n" and "lib/appname".

cd /opt
tar -xvzf /path/to/kumula-2005.11.tar.gz



Installation of MySQL

As mentioned above, Kumula needs access to a database server. If you want to use MySQL, you'll probably have to install it first. On SuSE 10, the following rpm-packages found in the distribution are needed:

(The last one's not obvious.)

When these are installed, make the MySQL-server start on system-startup by activating it in the runlevel-editor of your distribution: On SuSE 10 start YaST2 being root and go to System/Runlevel-Editor. There you find a list of all system-services. Scroll down until you see "mysql". Select it and click "activate". You should see an information-window, and after that the list entry should say "activated: Yes". Click on "finish" and confirm saving the settings.

mysql has its own password-system. You should set a mysql-root-password with

shell# mysqladmin -u root password yourpassword

(where "yourpassword" is your password).




System check

Check your system that all dependencies are installed. The Kumula apps are based on Qt, PyQt and need Python to run. Recommended is also the installation of the PyXML module and the Python Imaging Library (PIL). Access to a database server like MySQL is required. It is not needed to run the database and the programs on the same physical machine.




Database creation

You can install the necessary tables in any database you want. A database, e.g. named "kumula", can be created with MySQL running the following commands:

shell# mysql -u root -p 
mysql> create database `kumula`;
mysql> quit;

The command "mysql -u root -p" means, you start mysql as user "root" and are asked for the mysql-root-password.

In the package there are SQL database files. These files are stored in the "sql" sub-directory. They contain the commands to build the tables and some default data. Install them on the command line (as shown below), or via the execute command of a phpMyAdmin interface. These files are only needed for installation.

shell# cd sql/ 
shell# mysql -D kumula -u root -p < kumula.sql


Optional zone/city data (e.g. for Germany):

shell# mysql -D kumula -u root -p < zones_de.sql
shell# mysql -D kumula -u root -p < cities_de.sql


Optionally you can check, if the tables were created alright:

shell# mysql -D kumula -u root -p
mysql> show tables;
mysql> select * from cities;
mysql> quit;



Configure each user

The editing of the config file ".kumularc" in the user's home directory is not longer needed. Run Configurator instead (you can run any other Kumula app, you will be asked to start Configurator, when there's no config file yet). Use this app to set the main language (not supported yet), the database parameters and the third-party apps. Valid database-settings are for example:

Host: localhost
Port: 3306 (default)
Database: kumula
Username: root
Password: ************ (yourpassword (see above))
Type: MySQL

With these settings, you should succeed in connecting to the database server.
Repeat this step for each user which wants to use the software.




Finished!

After that, you should be able to start every Kumula application with the command "KUMULADIR/bin/appname" (e.g. "/opt/kumula/bin/clients"). For easy access, you should create shortlinks to your desktop.