## OpenACS 4.5 Release Notes

by Don Baccus and Vinod Kurup
OpenACS docs are written by the named authors, but may be edited by OpenACS documentation staff.

This is the official OpenACS 4.5 release. This release has been subjected to an organized test effort, but please bear in mind that we are still in the process of developing testing tools, methodology, and scripts.

Please report bugs using our Software Development Manager at the OpenACS website . The latest information on installing this alpha release under Oracle 8.1.6/7 or PostgreSQL 7.1.* can be found there as well. Currently the toolkit will not install under Oracle 9i due to Oracle having made "delete" an illegal name for PL/SQL procedures and functions.

Some users have reported success running OpenACS 4.5 under PostgreSQL 7.2, but there may still be some undetected problems with this platform.

You may want to begin by reading our installation documentation for Installing on Unix/Linux or Installing on Windows . Note that the Windows documentation is not current for OpenACS 4.5, but an alternative is to use John Sequeira's Oasis VM project .

After installation, the full documentation set can be found by visiting http://[your-host]/doc. Not all pieces are updated for OpenACS 4.5 at this moment.

### Site Wide Searching

If you're using Oracle 8.1.6 or 8.1.7 Enterprise Edition you may want to uncomment the SQL that causes InterMedia to keep online searching online while indexing. The feature doesn't exist in Standard Edition and OpenACS 4.5 now defaults to being loadable in SE. Just grep for 'sync' to find the code.

Also be sure to read the documentation in the Site Wide Search package's sql/oracle directory. The APM doesn't execute the SQL for this package, in part due to the fact that some steps need to be run as the Oracle user 'ctxsys'.

If you're using PostgreSQL be sure to read the documentation on installing the Open FTS driver for OpenACS. It's included in the package as a text file and is also summarized at the end of the installation documentation in the section, Set Up OpenFTS . As with the Oracle version, there are steps you must take manually in order to get this feature working.

### Testing Notes

We now maintain our test results using a custom OpenACS 4.5 package developed by OpenMSG . As can be seen from the notes, there are still some serious outstanding bugs in this release. If you don't like this state of affairs consider volunteering to help out. Just drop the project manager a quick note and you'll be signed up more quickly than you can say "wait! I've changed my mind!"

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