One of the problems is that the tool itself seems to have vanished from the trunk repository and so its existence was not at all obvious. There seem to be a few people having problems finding it and so I thought it worthwhile including the storebrowser files here so that you can get up and running more easily.

I’m going to document running StoreBrowser on your SERVER first. I’m assuming that you have a standard installation running on OpenSUSE 11.3 as that seems the best open source option at the current time (April 2011).

1) Download the zip package and unzip to a suitable location on your system.

2) Open a terminal window and navigate to the folder containing the StoreBrowser.exe file. It is important that you cd to this location as otherwise you will not be able to run it correctly.

3) Copy the asmx file to the appropriate place. This is OS specific and this guide is for OpenSUSE 11.3

cp SimiasBrowser.asmx /usr/lib/simias/web/

4) Ensure you have the directory ~/.local/share/ you may well need to mkdir ~/.local and then mkdir ~/.local/share .This location is used by the application to store its config data and it won’t auto create it, it will just complain.

5) if  echo $DISPLAY shows nothing in your terminal, enter the following command

export DISPLAY=:0.0

It is important to set the display otherwise mono will abort with an error like this;

Unhandled Exception: System.TypeInitializationException: An exception was thrown by the type initializer for System.Windows.Forms.XplatUI —> System.ArgumentNullException: Could not open display (X-Server required. Check you DISPLAY environment variable)

6) mono StoreBrowser.exe

If all is well, the application should launch with an empty window. First click on file and select Open Store as shown below;

After selecting Open Store, you will need to enter the url for the local simias store. For example this will typically be http://localhost/simias10

Click on OK and assuming all is well, you will be prompted to login. You need to enter your ADMIN username and password in order to access the store, normal user accounts won’t do.

Once logged in, you will see the store tree to the left, however there is actually more to see but it’s hidden to the right of the window. To make it visible, drag the bottom right corner of the application window to enlarge it, and then drag to the left the dividing line that you will be able to see when you enlarge the frame.

You should end up with something that looks like this;

If you expand the Store and select an entry, you will get screens like this;

You can edit items by double clicking them. BUT FIRST A WARNING. MAKING ANY CHANGES TO A LIVE SYSTEM COULD RESULT IN THE LOSS OF YOUR DATA. This is a low level debugging tool that should be wielded by experts (feel free to get in touch if you know any!) and making changes could leave your system in an unstable state. Don’t go editing and deleting things and then complain to me afterwards that all your users have lost their data … it will be your fault not mine.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you …

I’m taking it a tiny step further by documenting the process with screengrabs and showing how you can do this with Oracle’s VirtualBox.  We chose Virtualbox over VMWare because on the Apple Mac, VMWare Fusion is not free whereas Virtualbox is. The instructions for VMWare would be different, but the intent would be the same.

Click on New to create a new virtual system

Fire up virtualbox and click on the blue NEW icon to start the process of creating a new virtual system.

Click Continue

Give it a name and ensure you choose Linux / OpenSuse

The default RAM is tight, but OK for this demo. Increase it on a real deployment.

Click Continue

Now we will be asked about the virtual hard drive we will need.

Continue

Continue

Continue

Done

Now we are asked to confirm the virtual machine we are going to create.

Done

And we’re done … or rather we now have an empty virtual machine that we can install the base operating system onto and then begin setting up for iFolder.

And there it is ...

It’s important to note at this stage that we are yet to put an operating system onto our virtual machine, and before we do that, we need to have some installation disks available.

iFolder is currently not qualified for OpenSUSE 11.4, so we need to download an installer for OpenSUSE 11.3 which we can grab from software.opensuse.org/113/en it is a big download, so kick it off and make yourself a nice cup of tea!

Download the DVD and make some tea!

Once you have the ISO on your computer, we can fire up the virtual machine and install OpenSUSE onto it.  So first of all START the virtual machine we have just built and we’ll get the first run wizard.

Continue

Click the folder icon so we can browse to our ISO

Navigate to where our newly downloaded ISO file is.

Navigate then click Open

Continue

Done

Our virtual machine will now launch, boot from the virtual install DVD and we can begin the installation proper.

Select Installation and off we go ...

Rather than duplicate the official guide on how to proceed from here, I’m going to hand you over to the experts at Novell who have already prepared a full walk through on the simple installation procedure.  The complete OpenSUSE installation guide for 11.3 can be found here.

In the next part, I’ll show you how to install the pre-requisites that you are going to need in order to install iFolder.