Debian Known Issues

If you come across any unknown EPrints-specific issues please send a bug report to the eptech mailing list.

Known Issues

debian packages for version 3.3.13: Various problems related to subjects and divisions

Issue #291 has been resolved only after building debian packages for version 3.3.13.

This leads to problems with all operations reading tree structures from flat text files:

• bin/import_subjects produces essentially empty trees
• after creating a new repository with default divisions and subjects the divisions and subjects remain empty and more importantly, due to empty values most operations within the webinterface involving divisions or subjects yield an error, rendering the whole repository useless.

Solution: Manual edit

debian packages for version 3.3.13: links to /id/eprint/<NUMBER> yield 500 Internal Server Error

Solution: Manual edit

No Tools Available on Login

This occurs if you are using certain Firefox 3 versions on debian/ubuntu and you have your repository at http://localhost.

This is due to the fact that Firefox 3 won't let you store cookies for domains which don't have a domain. localhost.localdomain may work (untested) however the fix below encourages the use of example.org.

Basically it will work under most other browsers or you can do the following fix.

• Think of a domain for your repository and add this to your hosts file in /etc/hosts (here example.org) by doing the following as root.

 # vi /etc/hosts

Add the line

 127.0.0.1 example.org

• Then either create a new archive with example.org as its location

or

• Edit your archives 10_core.pl and change its location - as EPrints user

 vi archives/ARCHIVEID/cfg/cfg.d/10_core.pl

change the host line to your new host e.g.:

 $c->{host} = 'example.org';

Regenerate your apache config:

 bin/generate_apacheconf

As root restart your apache

 # apache2ctl graceful

Now you should be able to log in from the new url by pointing firefox at http://example.org

Wrong XML::LibXML Version

This affects mainly Ubuntu and older Debian distributions where the libxml package is too old. The package installer doesn't check the XML::LibXML version. Either install XML::LibXML 1.63 from cpan or disable it by setting enable_libxml to 0 in perl_lib/EPrints/SystemSettings.pm.

Installing 1.63 from cpan (as root):

# cpan XML::LibXML

Without either XML::LibXML or XML::GDOME, EPrints uses a bundled XML::DOM implementation that has much lower performance and poorer Unicode support. In future versions of EPrints only XML::LibXML will be supported. As this is widely available across the most commonly used Linux operating systems.

Note that you can build Debian packages from CPAN modules using dh-make-perl in order to keep track of those modules you've been building by yourself. Provided you've already configured your CPAN environment (that is, at least your proxies and servers), you can survive with:

dh-make-perl --install --notest --cpan XML::LibXML

DiskSpace.pm measuring disk usage (reiserFS)

Not supported in the default package install, to add support add the following to the array defined in $EPRINTS_HOME/perl_lib/Filesys/DiskSpace.pm

 1448756819 => "REISERFS_SUPER_MAGIC",    # 0x565A4653

Many thanks to José Miguel Parrella Romero for pointing this out.

Note that this was tested in a Debian GNU/Linux virtual private server running under Virtuozzo hypervision. Other filesystems, such as simfs, don't usually give any problems with DiskSpace.pm.

Debian 10 (Buster) no longer uses MySQL

Debian 10 has switched from using MySQL to MariaDB, so when trying to install from APT you will likley see an error like:

The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 eprints : Depends: mysql-server but it is not installable
           Depends: mysql-client but it is not installable
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

To solve this problem for pre-3.4.3 version of EPrints you will need to add the MySQL APT repository. EPrints 3.4.3+ should allow either MySQL or MariaDB to be installed. To add the MySQL APT repository for Debian 10 (Buster) follow the instructions below.

1. As the root user, change directory to tmp and download the MySQL configuration DEB package using wget

# cd /tmp
# wget https://dev.mysql.com/get/mysql-apt-config_0.8.16-1_all.deb

2. Install the DEB package using dpkg. When prompted you should not need to change any settings (i.e. stick with MySQL 8.0) so you can select OK. (If you are upgrading from Debian 9 it might be best to choose 5.7 to stay on the same version).

# dpkg -i mysql-apt-config*

3. Update APT to get new MySQL repository listings

# apt-get update

You should now be able to install EPrints through APT without any further issues.

Debian 10 (Buster) does not install CGI.pm

Debian 10's (Buster) dependency tree seems to be different to older versions and as a result does not install CGI.pm. To install this on pre-EPrints 3.4.3 versions, install the following additional dependency (as the root user) before trying to run epadmin.

# apt-get install libcgi-pm-perl

Also recommendable is to keep your perl modules by saving an autobundle with

# cpan -a

Where- and whenever you like the snapshot can be (re-)installed with

# perl -MCPAN -e 'install Bundle::Snapshot_yyyy_mm_dd_00'

Debian 10 (Buster) does not allow unprivileged access to MySQL root user

This is also an issue with Ubuntu 20.04, thus see advice at Installing EPrints on Debian/Ubuntu.