Ubuntu Server 10.4 Lucid – Installing Feng Office 1.7.4 Community Edition

Feng Office is a web based suite of collaborative applications (groupware) that includes notes, email, contacts, calendar, documents, tasks and weblinks. As an administrator you can setup users and collaborative workspaces and users can work in their own workspace as well as the collaborative workspace(s) that they have access to. I will be installing the current stable version of Feng Office which is 1.7.4 (although you can download and install 1.7.5 if you want to).

Note: I had to look around for a solution for enabling innoDB on Ubuntu 10.4 Lucid and fortunately did find a work-around that enabled me to install Feng Office. Having said that InnoDB should be enabled by default – it appears that MySQL seems to disable it if your InnoDB log files get corrupted. When you remove the log files they are recreated, allowing InnoDB to start again. This will be covered during the tutorial below if you also encounter this issue.

I installed Feng Office in a VMware vSphere virtual machine on an existing Ubuntu 10.4 Lucid LAMP server.

If you do not have Ubuntu Server 10.4 already installed you just need to choose the LAMP and SSH roles during installation. On an existing server without these roles installed enter the following command at the terminal (and then select the LAMP and SSH roles and make a note of your MySQL password for later):

sudo tasksel

Assuming that we now have the LAMP and SSH roles installed we can now connect remotely to the server using Putty (Windows) or SSH (Linux).

First install php5-gd, php5-cli and nano:

sudo apt-get install php5-gd php5-cli nano

Next check the memory_limit setting in php.ini.

sudo nano /etc/php/apache2/php.ini

Make sure that the memory_limit setting is set to at least 32 MB.

Install Unzip (so that we can unzip Feng Office after we download it):

sudo apt-get install unzip

Now change directory to /var/www and download Feng Office:

cd /var/www/
sudo wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/opengoo/
fengoffice/fengoffice_1.7.4/fengoffice_1.7.4.zip

Unzip Feng Office:

sudo unzip fengoffice_1.7.4.zip -d /var/www/feng_community

Feng Office will now be extracted to the folder feng_community in the /var/www directory.

Give ownership of the feng_community directory to Apache:

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/feng_community

The next step is to create a MySQL database for Feng Office:

mysql -u root -p

Enter your MySQL password when prompted.

At the mysql> prompt type the following commands – make sure you change ‘fengsqlpassword‘ to a password of your own:

create database fengdb;
create user 'fenguser'@'localhost' identified by 'fengsqlpassword';
grant all on fengdb.* to 'fenguser'@'localhost';
quit;

Now restart Apache:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

If you want to quickly check that InnoDB is running at this point you can do this as follows:

mysql -u root -p
mysql> show engines;

If InnoDB is not running then issue the following commands:

sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop
sudo mv /var/lib/mysql/ib_logfile0 /var/lib/mysql/ib_logfile0.bak
sudo mv /var/lib/mysql/ib_logfile1 /var/lib/mysql/ib_logfile1.bak
sudo /etc/init.d/mysql start

For good measure I rebooted – and then found that InnoDB was running: