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Mar 2007 10

A really easy installation for MacOS X users

Posted by bsag ¶

I’ve been playing around with Locomotive recently, and I’m really impressed how easy the whole process is now. I’ve altered the zip package of Tracks 1.043 to make it as easy as possible for MacOS X users. I’ve pre-configured the package to use the SQLite3 database, which is included in the package, and also set up the logs and environment.rb file so that all you need to do is download Locomotive, point it at your Tracks folder and go! The full instructions are in the tracks-1.043 folder in installation.html.

As a side effect, the process of installation should be a little easier for Windows and Linux users too, because you no longer need to do the tedious copying of the *.tmpl files and folders. I’ve also included a security patch (details here). If you’re using Tracks on a public server, I would install the new version, but if it’s on your own machine with no public access, you should be fine.

I’m going to radically overhaul both the installation method and instructions for the next release, because I know that people get put off by the installation process.

Update 2007-03-25: A few users bumped into a problem with using newer versions of the Locomotive bundles (see explanation here), so I’ve updated the tracks-1.043.zip package to fix the problem, and updated the installation.html to explain the importance of using the ‘Standard Rails March 2007’ bundle.

Filed under: macosx releases

12 Comments

Annoyed at 3 am
Wed, 21 Mar 2007 @ 04:59 ¶

Of course, this isn’t working. Something about “internal server error”.

bsag
Wed, 21 Mar 2007 @ 08:00 ¶

Did you follow the instructions exactly? I’ms sorry that it’s not working for you but other people have found that it works fine as described, so it may be that you have accidentally missed a step.

1. Are you using Mac OS X 10.4?
2. When you installed Locomotive, did you make sure that you dragged the Locomotive folder (containing another folder ‘Bundles’ and Locomotive.app itself) to your Applications folder, without renaming anything? If you rename any of the Locomotive components, it won’t work.
3. Similarly, don’t rename the tracks-1.043 folder.
4. Is there a locomotive.yml file inside tracks-1.043/config? If so, what are the contents.

Could you double check all of those and let me know how it goes? If it still doesn’t work, could you please send the log files (inside tracks-1.043/log) to me by email butshesagirl at rousette dot org dot uk.

Bear
Wed, 21 Mar 2007 @ 09:52 ¶

The solution is to avoid the standard Rails bundle which comes with locomotive, and install and use the ‘RMagick Sep 2006’ bundle instead.

Annoyed ...
Wed, 21 Mar 2007 @ 19:06 ¶

@bear

... What?

Jason
Thu, 22 Mar 2007 @ 01:13 ¶

I was receiving the same error 500 with the March build of Locomotive. I rolled back to the February build that is linked to out of the installation.html file in the tracks download and everything’s working like a dream now.

bsag
Thu, 22 Mar 2007 @ 17:21 ¶

I’ve released what the problem is, and it’s related to Jason’s comment above. To avoid rehashing the whole story here, please take a look at “this forum thread”:http://www.rousette.org.uk/projects/forums/viewreply/413/

I’ll update the package and instructions as soon as I can.

Annoyed ...
Sat, 24 Mar 2007 @ 04:36 ¶

@bsag

Yay! It works!

Thank you so much for your help!!!

bsag
Sat, 24 Mar 2007 @ 10:01 ¶

@Annoyed: You’re welcome.

ME
Sat, 2 Jun 2007 @ 14:56 ¶

OS X10.4 you never said it should be installed on Tiger and wasted my time

I can’t understand you programer guys you spend months writing stuff and at the and you are too lasy to spend a day to make a simple install.
it should JUST WORK! its as simple as that. Seems you need to go back to it and GET IT DONE.
as long as i cant install it in less than 2 min it is not done.
that is all. it is simple really. just common sence.

bsag
Sat, 9 Jun 2007 @ 13:17 ¶

ME: I didn’t waste your time, because it doesn’t have to be installed on Tiger - I was just asking if you were using Tiger because I’m more familiar with that set up and what is installed by default. Locomotive requires Panther (10.3) or greater. As you see, others have found that this method works and is fairly easy.

As for being too lazy to write a proper installer, I’m afraid it’s not as simple as that. Tracks is based on Rails, and due to it’s Unix origins and reliance on running a webserver, installation is not trivial. Add to that the fact that we support three very different platforms, and that it can be installed on a personal computer, or on a webserver available anywhere on the internet, we’d have to write at least 4 different installers, and even then it would probably fail on some platforms because of idiosyncracies of those platforms. So it’s not even vaguely a day’s work.

Despite that, there are many people using Tracks quite happily, some of whom are not at all experienced at installing these kinds of applications, so it can’t be that hard. Having said that, of course we want to make it even easier, and as such are looking into some of the new frameworks other developers are just starting to produce to allow web applications to be run as if they are a locally installed application (like Slingshot and Google Gears).

Tim
Wed, 27 Jun 2007 @ 10:00 ¶

@ bsag

—

Does this install works properly with the preview of leopard? do you have any experiences?

best regards,
tim

bsag
Wed, 27 Jun 2007 @ 10:08 ¶

@tim: I don’t have a preview seed of Leopard (unfortunately!), so I don’t know. I’ll have to wait until Leopard is released for real until I test it out.

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