Dokeos 1.8.5 Installation Guide

Documentation > Installation Guide

Thank you for downloading Dokeos, the open source Learning Management System for professionals. 

This guide explains how to install Dokeos Learning Management System (LMS). It explains how to install Dokeos Oogie PowerPoint conversion and Dokeos Videoconferencing although these packages are not required to use Dokeos LMS.  Please read this fully before proceeding with the installation.

If you want to save time, trouble and money, you can alternatively have your Dokeos portal hosted by Dokeos or one of its partners.

Contents

  1. Pre-requisites
  2. Installation of Dokeos LMS
  3. Upgrade from a previous version of Dokeos
  4. Troubleshooting
  5. Administration section
  6. LDAP 
  7. Oogie PowerPoint / Impress conversion
  8. Videoconferencing and audio-recorder
  9. Mathematical formulas with LaTeX

1. Pre-requisites

Dokeos can be installed on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and UNIX servers indifferently. However, we recommend the use of Linux server for optimal flexibility, remote control and scalability.

Dokeos is mainly a LMS running Apache, MySQL and PHP5 (the so called AMP trilogy).

It can be enriched with PowerPoint conversion (feature called Dokeos Oogie) using OpenOffice + Java. You may also want to add the Dokeos Videoconferencing plugin using the RED5 Open Source Flash server.

All these software are open source and freely available.

To run Dokeos LMS on your server, you need to install WAMP, LAMP or MAMP:

MySQL database server

You will need a login and password allowing to administrate and create at least one database. By default, Dokeos will create a new database for each course created. It means your host should allow you to create and administrate several databases. You can also install Dokeos using only one database, in that case you have to select this option during the installation.

To take advantage of Oogie PowerPoint / Impress conversion, you need  :

To take advantage of Dokeos Videoconferencing, you need :

2. Installation of Dokeos LMS


The following directories need to be readable, writeable and executable for everyone: (where 'dokeos' is the directory in which you installed Dokeos)

On Linux, Mac OS X and BSD operating systems you can use the CHMOD 777 command for this (although we recommend you seek advice from an experienced system administrator). In Windows, you may need to check the properties of the folders (by right-clicking on them).

2.5. The following files need to be readable and writeable for the web browser:

On Linux, Mac OS X and BSD operating systems you can use the CHMOD 666 command for this (although we recommend you seek advice from an experienced system administrator). In Windows, you may need to check the properties of the files and folders (by right-clicking on them).

NOTES:
Do not modify the home_*.html files directly. Instead, choose "Configure the homepage" in the Dokeos administration section.

Windows : with combination packages like XAMPP, out of the box, login and password for MySQL should probably remain empty.

Configuration and security after installation


PHP configuration

To get the best of Dokeos, you need to finetune PHP settings. Consider :

max_execution_time = 300    ; Maximum execution time of each script, in seconds
max_input_time = 600 ; Maximum amount of time each script may spend parsing request data
memory_limit = 256M      ; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume (128MB)
post_max_size = 64M
upload_max_filesize = 100M

Some users could meet problems if their PHP settings don't fit these ones:

Past Dokeos versions required register_globals to be set to On. This is no longer necessary, this can be set to Off and Dokeos will work fine.

BSD users: these php libraries have to be included during php installation:


3. Upgrade from a previous version of Dokeos

Before upgrading we heavily recommend you do a full backup of the previous Dokeos directories and databases. If you are unsure how to achieve this please ask your hosting provider for advice.

3.1 Upgrading from Dokeos 1.8.x

If you upgrade from Dokeos 1.8.x : 
* Styles and images are located in the main/css or main/img directories. You can still recover them from your backup if you have made it. Any modified style or image that uses the default style/image name will be overwritten by the next step. To avoid loosing your customisations, always ensure you copy the styles/images under a new name and use and modify the copy, not the original. The original will always be overwritten by newer versions. In Dokeos 1.8.5, we have changed the name of several CSS themes. Backwards compatibility is ensured by the fact that an upgrade only adds the new themes, but you should try and use these new themes rather than sticking to the old ones which will be deprecated shortly (not maintained).

3.2 Upgrading from Dokeos 1.6.x

If you upgrade from a lower version of Dokeos (1.6.x), the first and most important thing to do is to *move* your current directory to another place.
An easy way to do that is to create a subdirectory called "old_version" in your current Dokeos directory and move everything in there using a simple "move" command (i.e. under Linux: mkdir old_version; mv * old_verion/), then make the old_version/ directory writeable by the web server so that courses/ and upload/ directories can be moved from the old to the new installation.

The complete process is as follow:
NOTE: The upgrade from 1.6.x to 1.8.x implies a revision of the customised graphics and styles. The new version uses a complete new set of icons and styles, which means the ones from version 1.6 cannot be simply reused. The good news is the version 1.8.x allows you to create your own style in a separate css folder, that you can then reuse through all the 1.8.x versions

WARNING:
Do not delete the previous Dokeos installation directory before installing the new one. When the update is successfully finished, you can remove the old path.

NOTE:
Do not modify the home_*.html files directly. Instead, choose "Configure the homepage" in the Dokeos administration section.

3.3 In both cases

The following directories need to be readable, writeable and executable for the web server: On Linux, Mac OS X and BSD operating systems you can quick-fix this using the CHMOD 777 command, but if you are unsure, we recommend you seek advice for your own OS on our forum. In Windows, you may need to check the properties of the folders.

3.4 Quick-upgrade from 1.6.x guide for Linux

The following quick-upgrade guide assumes that:
On the command-line, type:
Then:

4. Troubleshooting

If you have problems, go to the Dokeos website and ask a question on the support forum. Please read the previous messages first to see if there is already an answer to your question. We also maintain a list of Frequently Asked Questions.

5. Administration section

To access the Dokeos administration section, open browser, go to your Dokeos adress and log in with the admin user. Then you will see a "Platform admin section" link in the header of the web page. There you can manage users, courses, sessions, portal look and feel, homepage content, course categories etc. 

6. LDAP

This part is optional, only organisations with an LDAP server will need to read this.
An LDAP module is already provided in Dokeos, but it has to be configured to make it work.

Compiling

Linux servers: It's possible that you have to recompile php with ldap support. Newer distributions also allow downloading rpms for additional packages.

Activating LDAP in Dokeos

In (dokeos folder)/main/inc/conf/configuration.php, around line 90, you see
//for new login module
//uncomment these to activate ldap
//$extAuthSource['ldap']['login'] = "./main/auth/ldap/login.php";
//$extAuthSource['ldap']['newUser'] = "./main/auth/ldap/newUser.php";

remove the // from the last two lines to activate LDAP.

Settings

Ask the LDAP server admin for the settings:

Since 1.8.5, you have to change the LDAP settings inside the "Portal administration" panel, under "Dokeos configuration settings", section "LDAP".
As an example, you should find the following kind of values:
LDAP main server's address: "myldapserver.com"; // your ldap server
LDAP main server's port: 389; // your ldap server's port number
LDAP domain: "dc=xx, dc=yy, dc=zz"; //domain

Teacher/student status

By default, Dokeos will check if the "employeenumber" field has a value. If it has, then Dokeos will consider this user as being a teacher.
If you want to change this behaviour, you can edit main/auth/ldap/authldap.php, function ldap_put_user_info_locally(), and change the if (empty($info_array[$tutor_field])) condition to whatever suits you.
You can also remove this check by removing the condition and leaving only the $status = STUDENT; line.

Protected LDAP servers

Some LDAP servers do not support anonymous use of the directory services.
In this case, you should fill in the appropriate fields in the administration panel (e.g. "manager" and "mypassword") and Dokeos will try to authenticate using these, or fall back to anonymous mode before giving up.

LDAP import into sessions

There is a new set of scripts now that allow you to insert users from LDAP directly into a Dokeos session. This, however, relies on a set of static choices in the LDAP contact attributes.
The fields used intensively by the Dokeos module are:

7. Oogie PowerPoint / Impress conversion

Oogie converts your presentations coming from Ms-Office and OpenOffice into SCORM standardized e-courses or learning paths. This feature needs OpenOffice to convert the slides and RED5 (optional) to record your voice on top of the slides through a Flash based audio-recorder.

7.1. PowerPoint / Impress conversion

On some Windows computers, located : C:\Program Files\OpenOffice.org 2.2\share\registry\data\org\openoffice\Setup.xcu
On some Linux computers, located : /usr/lib/openoffice/share/registry/data/org/openoffice/Setup.xcu

And add the following code
<prop oor:name="ooSetupConnectionURL">
<value>
socket,host=localhost,port=2002;urp;StarOffice.ServiceManager
</value>
</prop>

... just below these lines
 
<prop oor:name="ooSetupInstCompleted">
<value>false</value>
</prop>
Enter your Dokeos portal on the web > Admin section >  Configure the Services > Oogie and type :

Host : localhost
Path to LZX Files: /main/webrooms/recorder.swf

Leave the other fields empty
Leave the default width and height of the converted slides unchanged (as long as your clients use most often a 1024x768 standard definition screen)
NOTE : during the conversion, you should see a progress bar with a percentage. If you only see a default animated GIF progress bar without percentage, you may want to install the PECL library for PHP.

NOTE : On Linux servers, you may want to do a $ sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts so as to install Microsoft fonts. This will give PowerPoint conversion a better rendering.


7.2. Audio-recorder

See below : Videoconferencing

8. Videoconferencing and audio-recorder

We will now install and configure RED5 Open Source Flash server � the Dokeos RED5 webapplication. These will provide both
Oogie allows you to convert slides but also
NOTE : previous installation processes for this part were very complex. The whole setup was considerably simplified. Please ignore any previous documentation on the same topic.


You may want to take advantage of the audio recorder. For this :

More informations on RED5

Please take a look on this page : http://www.dokeos.com/wiki/index.php/Installing_videoconference

Configuration of your dokeos Videoconference plugin

The configuration of the VideoServing is done via the admin pages of Dokeos configuration in Dokeos platform admin, Configure the services, Configure Visio-conference
This contains the URL to the video conferencing application. You probably need to add something before these paths if Dokeos is not installed into the root of your webserver.
url:/main/webrooms/videoconference.html and
     /main/webrooms/videoconference2.html

Connect your Dokeos installation to RED5

You should tell Dokeos the configuration of you red5 server. This is done using the administration page of Dokeos. In the first field below the two url, set the public ip of your red5 server. The second field
will contain the value of  rtmp.port  from you red5 configuration and the last field will contains  rtmpt.port  value.

9. Mathematical formulas with LaTeX

You can enable mathematical equations writing inside the Dokeos online editor (FCKEditor) by applying the following steps: Adding the corresponding cgi-bin directory to your Apache configuration could be done, in Apache 2, like this:
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /var/www/cgi-bin/
<Directory "/var/www/cgi-bin">
  AllowOverride None
  Options ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
  Order allow,deny
  Allow from all
</Directory>
Adding a symbolic link can be done, under Windows, by creating a shortcut to the mimetex.exe file from the cgi-bin directory, or under Linux by issuing the following command:
ln -s /var/www/dokeos/main/inc/lib/mimetex/mimetex.cgi /var/www/cgi-bin/mimetex.cgi
This procedure should make a new icon available in your Dokeos online editor, which will make it possible to insert mathematical formulas into your documents.



Contact address: Dokeos, Rue du Corbeau, 108, B-1030 Brussels, Belgium
Mail: info@dokeos.com
Tel. +32 (0)2 669 69 55

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