Installing Alfresco on Debian GNU/Linux

Sometimes, work drives you to do things that you would never think of otherwise… well, I hope that at least the end result can be of any help to someone else…

If you have troubles installing Alfresco on Debian GNU/Linux 4.0, perhaps the following notes can help…

• If you add “non-free” to your source.list, you will get nice packages for Sun JDK 1.5; I tried to use CGJ JDK 1.4 together with tomcat-compat, but could not get to starting up alfresco;
• disable TOMCAT5_SECURITY setting its value to “no” in /etc/default/tomcat5.5; although setting this option to “no” should be required only for using the java-gcj-compat package, I could not have alfresco running with security enabled;
• if you prefer manually installing MySQL and Tomcat, like I did, or you have them already installed on your system, then download just the alfresco.war package and copy it to /var/lib/tomcat5.5/webapps;
• remember also to define the location for alfresco store, by defining the dir.root variable in /var/lib/tomcat5.5/webapps/alfresco/WEB-INF/ classes/alfresco/repository.properties.