Running ActiveMath

Starting

These are instructions how to start ActiveMath on a Unix system. We suppose the installation instructions are finished hence that a Java Virtual Machine is installed, version 1.5 or higher, and that a JAVA_HOME environmnent variable is properly. Finally we suppose we have, as current working directory, the activemath directory.

It is important that your machine can recognize it's TCP/IP name. On some network setting, and with particular ActiveMath usages, issues may arise. This can be checked using the command hostname and verifying that the result indeed corresponds to the name of machine you want to run ActiveMath on. It has been experimented that several partial network configurations may actually provide a wrong localhost name. This currently only affects the XML-RPC communication used in console-applets. A temporary workaround may be, on Unix systems, to set manually the localhost-name using the command (as root user) hostname x.y.z.t with (x.y.z.t being the IP-address, in case of doubt, use 127.0.0.1).

Note that ActiveMath comes with no content ("books") preconfigured. Content is found in the omdoc1 or in the content directories. Each collection has its own directory. To make a collection and its books available, copy (or link) its content descriptor file (ContentDescr_*.properties) to the conf directory before starting ActiveMath. Note that each book increases the memory requirements.

To start ActiveMath invoke the following scripts:


bin/amStartup

This starts the ActiveMath application server with all the configurations in conf/ActiveMath.properties, see the installation instructions to learn how to configure these. (Note: Starting with release 1.0-beta3, MBase and UserModel  are no longer separate servers and need not be started separately.)

Then direct your browser to http://localhost:8080/ (or other port-number if you changed server.xml).

Now, feel free to explore ActiveMath! You can either create a new user, or use the demo users anton, bert, clara, eva (their password is equal to their name -> anton=anton, etc.), or take a look at the demoguide at http://localhost:8080/ActiveMath2/main/help.cmd?topic=walktrough/ (if 8080 is the used port).

Stopping


bin/amShutdown

Testing

This section provides additional information which is only useful if you want to further test.

Lots of informations are also written to the log-files although this is mostly developer oriented. 

• logs/activemath.log - the debugging output of the application
• logs/buildindex.log - the debugging output of the buildIndex command. The file contains all the errors detected in the content (but generally can live with quite a few of them and the accesses. Configuration of the error messages for content is also done in conf/ActiveMath.properties.
• logs/localhost_access_log*.log - the webserver access protocol file

One can view each of these log as they are fed using a command similar to tail -f logs/activemath.log. Logging verbosity can be configured in the file conf/log4j.properties which can be edited reading the comments in the file, be careful that enabling DEBUG logging can slow down the server.

To be notified of ups-and-downs of your web-server a commodity has been provided, run bin/amMailingChecker start and it will regularly make sure that the web-server can serve the first page. (more on this in the properties).

Reporting bugs or wishes

The ActiveMath developers make extensive use of the Jira issue tracker to track bugs and feature-wishes. As a user, a more appropriate way of getting in contact with us is sending an email to support@activemath.org.

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