Testing Alfresco
August 6, 2008 12:05 pm GeneralI’ve been evaluating Alfresco over the last day or two, and I’ve had some trouble getting started.
The main problem I’ve had is that there doesn’t seem to be any docs specifically for people trying out the 30 day hosted evaluation. All the docs I’ve seen have, at some stage, entries like “If you are unable to map your drive, contact your system administrator or refer to the topic Setting up the CIFS server in the Installation Guide”. There seems to be an underlying assumption I’m self-hosting.
So in spite of my best efforts to try and use CIFS or WebDAV to copy content, play with versioning, etc, I have no idea what to enter for server name, share & directory for a file share in Nautilus, and the links “View in CIFS” and “View in WebDAV” don’t work for me in Firefox.
I also downloaded AlfrescoEnterprise 2.2.0, which suffers from the typical problems I’ve seen most Java enterprise software suffer from – it doesn’t seem to work out of the box. I have a JDK installed, and OpenOffice, but the various install scripts fail at various points because @@ALFRESCO_DIR@@ hasn’t been replaced during installation, and once I’ve edited the scripts to handle that, one script (start_oo.sh) looks for an soffice binary in “~/Alfresco/openoffice.org2.1/program/”. So, not heard of “which” then.
End result of several hours of playing around is that Alfresco looks like a nice web application, but I’m not in a position to recommend it to Linux users because the client software doesn’t install properly, and I can’t figure out how to use the file shares in Nautilus.
Lazyweb, can you help me out, please?
PS. Why does Nautilus’s “Windows share” dialog have all 3 of server, share and folder? I’d really like to be able to follow docs for windows that talk about entering \\YourMachineName\alfresco\Users\YourSpaceName as the share (s/\\/\//g;s/^/smb:/), and let the client software work out which bits are the share, and which bits are folders. Idem for WebDAV.
Update: I thought I’d hit the motherlode when I chose ” Custom location” and put in dav://community.alfresco.com/alfresco/webdav/Trial%20Spaces/dneary%40free.fr and got asked a username and password – but Nautilus gave me an error: “Response invalid”. No idea what that response was, or any indication of how I can fix it, though.
August 6th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
Hi,
I’ve been working with Alfresco and Liferay during my internship and I’ve wrote some docs concerning these softs.
I’ve only tested on windows but maybe this could help…
Feel free to ask forums (http://forums.alfresco.com/en/ and http://forums.alfresco.com/fr/) theses are helpful…
August 6th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
me again,
The following link may help
http://forums.alfresco.com/fr/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1550
(and as you have noticed i’m french, be gentle with google translate ;))
August 6th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Hi Loic,
Thanks for the link! In the wiki I also found information (not as detailed) related to installing Alfresco server on Ubuntu. But the information I’m looking for is about using Alfresco on-demand (the one on the alfresco.com site) with my normal tools like Nautilus, OOo, etc. Thanks anyway!
Cheers,
Dave.
August 7th, 2008 at 8:32 am
From what little experimenting I’ve done with Alfresco I haven’t come away a happy camper.
When running Alfresco locally I can connect using either CIFS (SMB) or WebDAV.
I changed the ports for CIFS in ./tomcat/shared/classes/alfresco/extension/file-servers-custom.xml and set-up some firewall rules to redirect so it would run as non-root. I can connect using:
smb://admin:admin@127.0.0.1/alfresco
The executables laying around make me wonder if this is even supposed to work under GNU/Linux. According to the documentation these virtual exectuables are supposed to handle checking-in/checking-out etc.
For WebDAV the URL dav://localhost:8080/alfresco/webdav works for me in Nautilus but it isn’t useful at all (can’t edit files directly and whatnot).
When it comes to versioning though, nothing seems to happen. Items do not have any versioning history what so ever. Actions using CIFS and WebDAV both seem to create new nodes instead of new versions.
Let me know if any of this does anything for you.
September 2nd, 2008 at 11:34 am
I’ve had a play with this too. After trying just about every combination in the “Connect to Server” dialog, I finally got access.
However, when I tried editing a file in one of the spaces, it worked, but blew away all the previous versions, version information, etc. When viewed through the browser all the links were broken too – I had to navigate back to the top and down again to find the file.