Any experiences with installing eZ on a USB memory stick?

Author Message

Ulrich L.

Sunday 03 September 2006 3:43:36 am

Hi,
I would like to create a development environment on a USB memory stick in order to be able to work on my Laptop as well as on my Desktop PC etc... (Windows environment)

Any experiences with this here?

On my Desktop system, I am running XAMPP. Is it possible to put it on a USB stick together with eZ and everything you need?

Thanks for any advice,
Ulrich

Norman Leutner

Monday 04 September 2006 12:48:35 am

Take a look at
http://ez.no/products/add_ons/ez_publish_livecd

maybe this helps...

Mit freundlichen Grüßen
Best regards

Norman Leutner

____________________________________________________________
eZ Publish Platinum Partner - http://www.all2e.com
http://ez.no/partners/worldwide_partners/all2e_gmbh

Ulrich L.

Monday 04 September 2006 1:20:54 am

You mean I should put the content of the LiveCD on a USB stick and boot from it?

However, in this case I would lose my Windows environment while developing.

Claudia Kosny

Monday 04 September 2006 1:55:36 am

Hi Ulrich

I have not tried it but I don't think that there would be any major problems except maybe for the speed. You can apparently run XAMPP from an USB stick without problems (check their (german) FAQ if necessary), so the server and the database are there. Imagemagick might be a problem as there is only an installer for windows, no zip file. But as this guy here http://www.chsoftware.net/en/useware/wos/wos.htm has managed it, it is obviously possible to run it from a USB stick as well.

Apart from the path to Imagemagick EZ uses only relative paths so EZ itself should not cause any problems. Be careful though that your USB stick has enough capacity as XAMPP alone needs around 200 MB (unless you use xampp lite). As EZ reads and writes a lot of files you need to use USB2 for sure, otherwise it will most likely be very slow.

Greetings from Luxembourg

Claudia

Xavier Dutoit

Monday 04 September 2006 8:51:04 am

Hi,

You're probably using some kind of editor/ide as your development environment.
It wouldn't make sense to have that installed on each of your pcs and the other softwares on the stick (including the apache+php+mysql+...), would it ?

I'd suggest to install apache+mysql+... on each of these pcs as you did with your ide and have a config with the document root +mysql var dir on the usb stick.

Then you only have ezpublish+the datas on the usb stick, but you can use it from every of your pcs.

X+

P.S.Actually, what i'd really suggest to you is to get rid of windows, but that's another topic ;)

http://www.sydesy.com

Ulrich L.

Tuesday 05 September 2006 6:58:55 am

Thank you all.

Today I tried. I use a 2GB stick (NTFS).
I made everything similar to my desktop install, except the suggested change in XAMPP (no absolute paths).

I was able to proceed the complete setup wizard, however when finally calling the site and the admin site, I got error messages I am not used to:

admin site:

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 60 seconds exceeded in G:\xampp\htdocs\cms\lib\ezfile\classes\ezfile.php on line 177
Fatal error: eZ publish did not finish its request

The execution of eZ publish was abruptly ended, the debug output is present below.

(but there was no further ouput...)

site:

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 60 seconds exceeded in G:\xampp\htdocs\cms\lib\eztemplate\classes\eztemplatecompiler.php on line 165
Fatal error: eZ publish did not finish its request

The execution of eZ publish was abruptly ended, the debug output is present below.

Any ideas what the reason for this behaviour could be?
(Where is it possible to expand the max execution time? However, this probably will not be the solution...)

Claudia Kosny

Tuesday 05 September 2006 8:10:25 am

Hello Ulrich

As it is your own server you can just edit the php.ini file. Somewhere in the file there is a setting for max_execution_time, just increase the number.

Alternatively you can add the following to your .htaccess file or virtual host container:
php_value max_execution_time 300

(the 300 is the number of seconds).

According to the PHP Manual you can also set to 0 for unlimited but this poses some risk to your server as a script might hog all resources until the server crashes.

Claudia

Ulrich L.

Tuesday 05 September 2006 11:05:37 am

It seems to work!

I changed max execution time to 120.

I didn't expect it to work due to this change, I thought the real problem would be elsewhere, but I was wrong, fortunately...

Speed is a little bit disappointing, compared to my desktop install. My USB stick writes 9MB/s, this is a medium performance. Don't know wether it would improve much with a slightly better write performance.

Claudia Kosny

Tuesday 05 September 2006 12:06:35 pm

Hi Ulrich

I am pretty sure that the speed would improve quite a lot with faster write performance. When I use EZ on my laptop it is incredibly slow - on my desktop (which has the same amount of RAM and same processor speed, but a much faster harddrive) the same install works very nicely.

I have heard that external harddrives are faster then usb drives even though they are connected via usb as well. So you might want to try that out although it will not help much if it is your usb port that is so slow.

Greetings from Luxembourg

Claudia

Ulrich L.

Thursday 07 September 2006 1:48:34 pm

I tested the same thing now with a small USB hard disk drive. It does not require a power supply, there is a notebook HD inside, surely not the fastest...

However, it is remarkably faster than the USB stick and pretty portable as well, so that's probably the better way to go.

Timothy Baldwin

Saturday 27 January 2007 8:33:33 pm

I have a larger external HDD, and would like to have more information about using XAMPP and eZ Publish.

I have changed XAMPP to work from the HDD using the setup_xampp.bat and I have php4 running instead of php5.
eZ publish is installed in htdocs/my_site/
When I go to http://localhost/my_site/index.php I get "Page cannot be displayed" in IE , or "Connection was reset" in FireFox.

I will admit that I am a total n00b when it comes to some of this stuff.
I worked with eZ in 2002-2003, but no experience with actually installing a web server (other than IIS, haha).

I would be very grateful for any help on this.
If I get it working, I will make an effort to create a walk-through for this process to help other users.

EDIT: Finally got the setup wizard to start! I had to enable eAccelerator. I will let you know if I run into any other problems!

EDIT2: Finally got it work. It wasn't as hard as I made it seem. Now that I got it working I will try to put this in a step-by-step.

Saving the world, one packet at a time.

/dev/null

Monday 29 January 2007 6:25:06 pm

Master the fundamentals and this will be of no consequence or interest ...

PS. I suggest using Slax (SLAX Server Edition) + eZ for this seemingly mad little exercise ;)

http://merlin.fit.vutbr.cz/mirrors/slax/SLAX-5.x/special-editions/slax-server-5.1.8.1.iso
http://www.slax.org/documentation.php
http://www.slax.org/download.php
http://www.slax.org/

<i>/dev/null

... Waltz In The 4Th Dimension</i>

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