Forum OpenACS Q&A: OpenACS/FreeBSD Installation Guide

Probably not, but this will:

https://openacs.org/new-file-storage/one- file.tcl?file_id=217

This the OpenACS 4 on Mac OS X HOWTO that I have been working on for sometime. Feedback appreciated. Enjoy,

One note for people planning to use AOLserver on *BSD and expect high loads: last time I checked, the threading library on FreeBSD was less than optimal, and it does not take advantage of multiple processors (it was doing something similar to the GNU pth library, by emulating threads in a single process). Things might have changed, so take this with a grain of salt :)

In real-world use, I would be busy trying to ensure that my Linux boxes had the latest security patches, and after upgrading my libs for the nth time, I would be in the midst of tracking down weird issues with binaries using those shared libs.

In the real-world, if a customer had a problem, I would just buy them an Athlon and load them up with RAM and RAID.

One note for people planning to use AOLserver on *BSD and expect high loads: last time I checked, the threading library on FreeBSD was less than optimal, and it does not take advantage of multiple processors (it was doing something similar to the GNU pth library, by emulating threads in a single process). Things might have changed, so take this with a grain of salt :)

Petru - I solved this issue by using linuxthreads and recompiling AOLServer to use it. I had another posting about this in the OpenACS board a while back. Essentially, one instance of AOLServer will only use one processor. After linuxthreads, the individual AOLServer threads can be spread across both processors.

Gilbert, were you able to link nsxml.so dynamically against libxml? The only way I could get AOLserver to load nsxml was to link it in statically.

Matthew - I'm not sure if it was dynamically linked to libxml. I didn't check. I just loaded up the ports package of libxml2, changed the makefile for nsxml, and compiled nsxml. Here is the makefile. I'm not sure if this means I statically linked it or not.

ifdef INST
NSHOME ?= $(INST)
else
NSHOME ?= ..
endif

#
# Module name
#
MOD       =  nsxml.so

CFLAGS       += -I/usr/local/include

#
# Objects to build.
#
OBJS      =  ns_xml.o

# Uncomment for libxslt support
#CFLAGS = -DDO_XSLT
#MODLIBS   = -lxml2 -lxslt

# This is if you only want libxml support (no XSLT support)
#MODLIBS   = -lxml2
MODLIBS   = /usr/local/lib/libxml2.so

include  $(NSHOME)/include/Makefile.module

I am also interested in your dependancy flag for AOLServer. I could be wrong, but I don't think there is anything special for the aD patches. I have to add in nscache, nssha1 and nsrewrite after the initial build.

You're in charge of the AOLServer port, right? Can you also add a patch for the tcl8.2.3/unix/tclUnixPipe.c file. I've created my own patch based on some info I found on the OpenACS board. I have to patch it manually right now and it would be nice to have it done automatically.

Rolf, that link was posted before and fortunately no one paid attention to it. The page is so full of crap that the only thing it deserves is a good laugh while trying to figure whether the author is a *BSD troll or just plain stupid.

To be fair though, I think two or three of his points are correct and represent real problems with Linux. That does not mean that "Linux sux", neither that "*BSD rox".

Anyway, this is getting way offtopic. I invite interested parties to a plain old email flame 😉