joe’s blog

so i’ve been meaning to make this post for a while now … both for my own documentation and hopefully someone else’s. I’ve been experimenting with GeoServer and throughout my trials jotted down a couple things:

Running GeoServer in Windows XP (and from a usb / flash drive)

the other day, a relatively easy install of GeoServer wasn’t working out for some reason. it wasn’t working on my Windows XP workstation install OR from my usb / flash install with Jo Cook’s Portable GIS. i hopped on the #geoserver IRC channel and posted … a kind user pointed out that “It’s [GeoServers startup log] complaining that the EPSG database cannot be created or is incomplete,, it’s written to a temp directory on startup”. so i went to track that down – cleaned out some of the files – and viola! GeoServer loaded ~ so my tip #1:

• IF YOU’RE HAVING TROUBLE WITH ’503′ (i think they were 503) ERRORS WHEN LOADING GEOSERVER – try cleaning out some of your:

C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Local Settings\Temp folder

Running GeoServer in Ubuntu

tip #2 this involves environmental variables in Ubuntu. i consider myself a *nix, Ubuntu newbie – so this involved a little research and testing..but not too much thankfully.

• AFTER INSTALLING JAVA AND EXTRACTING GEOSERVER TO YOUR CHOSEN DESTINATION (i picked /usr/local) – run these commands to set environmental variables and paths for GeoServer:

to run commands as root, enter

$ sudo su

you can paste all of this into the Terminal now

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun
export PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin
export GEOSERVER_HOME=/usr/local/geoserver-1.7.2
export GEOSERVER_DATA_DIR=/usr/local/geoserver-1.7.2/data_dir

to check your JAVA_HOME setting or your PATH setting for example, enter

echo $PATH

you can also permanently add this to the PATH by editing /etc/environment. to do this, enter

sudo gedit /etc/environment

that’s all i have for now … i know this is pretty basic, but like i said – this was documentation for me too i think GeoServer may have similar instructions lined out here, i know there are instructions which load GeoServer at boot time here…i’ll be doing that soon. and yes, if you didn’t catch that – setting the path and env variables like i did above is temporary from what i’ve deduced.