PostBooks ERP On Ubuntu 7.04

Version 1.0
Author: Oliver Meyer <o [dot] meyer [at] projektfarm [dot] de>

This document describes how to set up PostBooks ERP on Ubuntu 7.04. The resulting system provides a powerful GUI-based ERP-system. Postbooks is licensed under the CPAL license (OSI-certified Common Public Attribution License).

This howto is meant as a practical guide; it does not cover the theoretical backgrounds. They are treated in a lot of other documents in the web.

This document comes without warranty of any kind! I want to say that this is not the only way of setting up such a system. There are many ways of achieving this goal but this is the way I take. I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

1 Preparation

Set up a basic ubuntu 7.04 system and update it.

2 Get Postbooks

cd ~

wget http://mesh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/postbooks/PostBooks-2.2.0Beta3-Linux6.tar.bz2
wget http://mesh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/postbooks/postbooks_quickstart.backup
wget http://mesh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/postbooks/init.sql

tar xvfj PostBooks-2.2.0Beta3-Linux6.tar.bz2

3 Install PostgreSQL

sudo apt-get install postgresql-8.1 postgresql-contrib-8.1

4 Configure PostgreSQL

The default configuration of PostgreSQL on Debian and Debian-based distributions requires that the system-username is the same as the postgresql-username to connect to postgresql.

So we have to customize the pg_hba.conf:

sudo vi /etc/postgresql/8.1/main/pg_hba.conf

Near the end of the file you should see this:

# TYPE DATABASE USER CIDR-ADDRESS METHOD
# "local" is for Unix domain socket connections only
local all all ident sameuser
# IPv4 local connections:
host all all 127.0.0.1/32 md5
# IPv6 local connections:
host all all ::1/128 md5

Change it to:

# TYPE DATABASE USER CIDR-ADDRESS METHOD
# "local" is for Unix domain socket connections only
#local all all ident sameuser
local all all trust
# IPv4 local connections:
#host all all 127.0.0.1/32 md5
host all all 127.0.0.1/32 trust
# IPv6 local connections:
#host all all ::1/128 md5
host all all ::1/128 trust

Now restart Postgresql:

sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql-8.1 restart

5 Prepare Postgresql For Postbooks

cd ~

sudo su postgres

psql -U postgres -f init.sql template1
createdb -U mfgadmin mfg
pg_restore -U mfgadmin -d mfg postbooks_quickstart.backup -v

6 Create A Desktoplauncher

Right click on the Desktop and choose "Create Launcher..." from the menu.

In the new window choose:

Type: Application
Name: Postbooks (or something else)
Command: /home/%yourusername%/PostBooks/PostBooks
Comment: Insert something if you want
Icon: Select one if you want