I was tasked with setting up a test Omeka Server for our Library Archivist, based on the installation section on the site this should take about “five-minutes” give or take.

What is Omeka

Omeka is a free and open source collections based web-based publishing platform for scholars, librarians, archivists, museum professionals, educators, and cultural enthusiasts. Its “five-minute setup” makes launching an online exhibition as easy as launching a blog. Omeka is designed with non-IT specialists in mind, allowing users to focus on content and interpretation rather than programming. It brings Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to academic and cultural websites to foster user interaction and participation. It makes top-shelf design easy with a simple and flexible templating system. Its robust open-source developer and user communities underwrite Omeka’s stability and sustainability.

What are the minimum and the recommended specifications?

• Linux operating system

• Apache HTTP server (with mod_rewrite enabled)

• MySQL version 5.0 or greater

• PHP scripting language version 5.2.4 or greater (with mysqli and exif extensions installed)

• ImageMagick image manipulation software (for resizing images in Omeka)

Direct Link to Omeka Documentation

http://omeka.org/codex/Documentation

Omeka Plugins

http://omeka.org/add-ons/plugins

Installation

http://omeka.org/codex/Installation

http://digin.arizona.edu/files/omeka.pdf

The above instruction goes under the assumption that you already have a LAMP environment in place. Since I haven’t done a LAMP setup in quite some time I did a google.com search and landed on one of my favorite tutorial site http://www.howtoforge.com/ubuntu_lamp_for_newbies.

One small issue I encountered and how I resolved it

After doing the LAMP setup and following both guides under the installation section, I connected to the web server URL http://server and instead of displaying, I was prompted to download a file “index.php”.

Back to google.com…After searching going through the various Apache configuration folders and directories, I realize that I needed to add the below configuration to the bottom of the mime.conf file just above the last <!– /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-1610611985 1107304683 0 0 415 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} “” closing tag.

Steps taken:

Logged into the Linux Web Server and made the following changes;

ituser@TestSrvr:/$ cd /etc/apache2/mods-enabled

ituser@TestSrvr:/$ sudo nano ./mime.conf

Open IfModule mod_mime.c

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php

AddType application/x-httpd-php .phtml

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php3

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php4

AddType application/x-httpd-php .html

AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps

Close IfModule

Reference –> http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=7584

Restarted apache “sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart” and I was ready to rock-n-roll!