Documentation

Installation

Requirements Reference

This page is a reference that we use to produce the pages [[Running on Linux]] and [[Running on Windows]]. If you are just starting out you may want to check with those first.

Firefox's Brain-damaged Hotkey Setting

Andromeda is used to create programs for people who use keyboards, often heavily, and are used to doing all of their work in "heads-down" mode, not taking their fingers off the home row.

For this reason, the program uses a lot of hotkeys. Beginning with version 2, Firefox broke their hotkey system by setting the default to SHIFT+ALT, which might be better termed "clumsy key" setting.

To fix this, you need to type "about:config" into the address bar, and then in the "filter" box type "ui.key". Look for "ui.key.contentAccess" and change it from 5 to 4, which sets it back to ALT.

PHP

As of April 12, 2007, The particular requirements for PHP are:

• Postgres support installed
• Version 5.0+ (5.1 not required)
• PEAR package Net_SMTP (and dependencies)

As of March 2008 requirements for curl and PEAR::Archive_Tar have been removed by our conversion to subversion.

There are a couple of php.ini settings that should be changed:

• max_execution_time must be expanded. Building a database will often exceed 30 seconds, and can run as much as 3-4 minutes.
• memory_limit must be expanded beyond 8M, otherwise a database build will simply stop with a maddening lack of any kind of error or notice.
• variables_order is assumed to be "EGPCS", important so that $_ENV gets loaded automatically on Windows systems and AndroBuild can detect that it is on Windows.
• Option "Short_open_tag" turned on in php.ini
• Options "Magic_Quotes_gpc" and "magic_quotes_runtime" turned off (PHP 5.x and lower)

Apache

Apache mod_rewrite must be on to make use of friendly URLs.

Postgres

Version 8.1 or better is required.

During installation of Andromeda, a user must manually create the empty 'andro' database and the 'root' group. The user must also create their own superuser account and assign it to the 'root' group.

As of July 25, 2007, Postgres requires that perl be installed on your system.

These lines must be in pg_hba.conf, in this order:

#  Allows root and postgres to get in
local   all         postgres    ident andromeda
# Users in pg group "root" can connect to anything
local   all         +root        password
# Members of the eponymous role can login
local   samename    all         password
local   samegroup   all         password

In order to let linux users root and postgres to get in, we need these lines in pg_ident.confg

andromeda     postgres          postgres
andromeda     root              postgres