BIRCH - birchconfig for new installation

1. Running the installer.

From the BIRCH home directory, type

cd install-birch
./birchconfig.sh

(Warning: birchconfig will NOT work correctly if launched from a different directory!)

The main birchconfig window will appear:

If the birchconfig window does not appear, and you get error messages, Java may be missing from your $PATH. See inst.java.html for more details.

Choose "New BIRCH Installation" :

The new install window will appear similar to that shown above. The program will make guesses for the BIRCH home directory, the Userid of the BIRCH administrator, and the Default platform. The Email address of the BIRCH Administrator will initially be blank. Fill in the email address, and make any other changes if the values guessed by the program are incorrect. You may wish to view the Help information for details on what these values should be.

When the information is complete, choose "Begin BIRCH Installation". The installer will begin, and a long stream of messages will be printed to the screen as the installation progresses. Finally, you will see messages similar to the following:

Setting up .login file
Setting up .cshrc file
Setting up .profile file
Setting up .bash_profile file
Setting up .bash_login file
Setting up .bashrc file
Done!
Logout and login again so that the changes can take effect.

and a message will pop up saying "BIRCH Installation complete". Click OK.

2. Make a bookmark in your web browser for your local copy of the BIRCH documentation.

The birchconfig installer creates a local copy of the BIRCH documentation, customized for your system. The home page of the documenatation is $BIRCH/public_html/index.html, where $BIRCH is the folder in which BIRCH was installed.

To make things easy, after the install is completed, the installer automatically opens your customized BIRCH documentation in a web browser. Make sure to bookmark this page so that you can find it easily.

3. Some things to know

A summary of the installation steps can be found in the BIRCH home directory in the files birchconfig.install.log (overview of the install) and birchconfig.screen (messages from install scripts that are also echoed to the screen). If you have problems during your install, and wish to report them to the BIRCH developers, make sure to mail us these files, along with your description of the problem.

At this point, you should have a fully-functional BIRCH site. All programs should work as seen in the tutorials. The one exception is that at this stage, the documentation can only be read by a web browser running on the same machine as the BIRCH installation. For example, in Mozilla, you could read the BIRCH home page by chosing File --> Open File and opening the file $BIRCH/public_html/index.html. See BIRCH - Customize Documentation to find out how to make the documentation readable through the Web.

Reminder: At this point, the only user who can actually run BIRCH programs is the BIRCH administrator. Each user must run the 'newuser' script to activate BIRCH access. For example, if BIRCH was installed in /home/birch, the command would be:

/home/birch/admin/newuser

Please send suggestions of comments regarding this page to psgendb@cc.umanitoba.ca