21 August 2009, 7:31

1. I am trying to use an external hard drive to load and run Wamp and Mahara.
2. I have downloaded the Wamp 2.0i software and have loaded it onto the hard drive.
3. I have followed each step as indicated by the instructions located at  http://wiki.mahara.org/System_Administrator's_Guide/Installing_Mahara/Installing_Mahara_in_WampserverHowever, after creating the database in step 6 of the instructions:  6. Once the database has been created, go to the “localhost” option of Wampserver. You will see that under “Project”, there is a new folder for Mahara. Click on it in order to complete the installation.
4. I am unable to locate the the folder which should show up under the projects folder. To that end, the only folder that I see is on the page which is called when you click on localhost from the tray icon. It is called "Your Projects" and not "Projects". If this is the folder that I should be locating, I do not see the Mahara folder there.

 ERRORS that appear at the bottom of the MyAdminPHP page:

1. The additional features for working with linked tables have been deactivated. To find out why click here.
2. Your configuration file contains settings (root with no password) that correspond to the default MySQL privileged account. Your MySQL server is running with this default, is open to intrusion, and you really should fix this security hole by setting a password for user '.root'.

I do not have a clue as to what I am doing as this all new to me. Please help as I am trying resolve this issue so I can share what seems to be awesome experience and  concept with my students starting next week. 

Thanks in advance for your help!! 

22 August 2009, 1:32

Hi - hopefully someone who knows more about WAMP can help you out, the core developers don't use it for hosting Mahara.

If you're in need of a Mahara installation to play around on, you're most welcome to use demo.mahara.org, or even mahara.org itself. We don't guarantee uptime/backups on them, but they're available if you need  

23 August 2009, 17:28

I've just updated the instructions on installing Mahara in Wampserver and I've been able to install Mahara on Wampserver 2.0i following them.

Regarding the error at the bottom of the MyAdminPHP page, that's normal. Wamp (and Xampp for that matter) install MySQL with the administrator account (root) withou password, which is a big security risk if you are going to allow access from other computers to that installation.

Saludos.
Iñaki.

23 August 2009, 19:26

Thank you for the assistance..

I have been able to move past the folder issue with the new information but now I continue to  get the following error:

You are not using a UTF-8 database. Mahara stores all data as UTF-8 internally. Please drop and re-create your database using UTF-8 encoding.

I have dropped, recreated the mahara database and restarted services several times. How do I fix this error? Thanks in advance for the help!!

 Lynn

24 August 2009, 7:37

Hello Lynn,

When you create the database in phpmyadmin, are you choosing the option "“utf8_unicode_ci” in the select box?

I had once the same error message because I hadn't chosen  the right codification.

Regards

24 August 2009, 20:39

Hi,

 Yes.. I followed the instructions explicitly. They called for the utf8_unicode_ci and that's what I selected from the drop down menu. Any ideas of what may be wrong??

 Thanks!

Lynn

27 August 2009, 5:46

Hello Lynn.

I have to attend some meetings/events at Firnhornd College and I couldn' t read your message until now,

I wonder if your problem coud be solved if you create manually the database, for that, you need to open a DOS window, and then go to (path to wamp)/wamp/bin/mysql/mysql5.0.51b , then you type:

mysql -h localhost -uroot -pyourpassword and then

CREATE DATABASE mahara ; 

I haven't used Windows for a while as I am trying to learn Ubuntu now, but I think that this may work.

As Inaki wrote in the documentation, the instructions for installing Mahara in Wamp server are just a attempt of making it work, but there are many issues that we cannot predict.

 Regards

Mari

27 August 2009, 18:43

You might want to modify that command to:

CREATE DATABASE mahara DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8;

Note that character sets and collations are different. Though I don't think you can use the utf8_* collations without the database being UTF8. But then, MySQL was never very good about telling you of errors... 

31 August 2009, 6:06

Hi Nigel,

I think that, in order to force the utf8 unicode codification, the instruction should be:

CREATE DATABASE moodle DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;

Am I right?

 Anyway, as you mention, probably the fastest way is that Lyn has a go at 

Mahara.org is she wants to test Mahara.

Regards 

31 August 2009, 18:59

I'm not sure you can create a UTF8 database without using a UTF8 collation of some sort. It doesn't matter which collation you use, by the way. So you can specify any collation you choose there 

The utf8_unicode_ci collation sorts case insensitively by unicode byte ordering. This isn't always desirable, depending on your native language. This page on the MySQL documentation explains more about the available collations.