Install the Operating System

Install the appropriate Ubuntu Server operating system. If want a GUI you can do this with ubuntu desktop and then install all the dependencies as described. This setup has been tested on Ubuntu 9.10 but should work at least on 8.10 or more recent. If you are installing the server edition install mysql, tomcat6, LAMP stack and printer server when prompted during the installation process.

Install Required Software

From a command prompt install the following packages and their dependancies if they are not already installed:

sudo apt-get install mysql-server phpmyadmin tomcat6 tomcat6-admin libmysql-java

Make Required Configuration Changes

Increase Memory Limit of PHP

sudo nano /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

Increase upload_max_filesize from 2M to 20M

This will allow you to import the database using phpmyadmin

Create a symbolic link for the mysql-java connector in tomcat

sudo ln -s /usr/share/java/mysql-connector* /usr/share/tomcat6/lib/

Change the ubuntu default settings in tomcat6

sudo nano /etc/default/tomcat6

• Increase tomcat memory by adding the following to the JAVA_OPTS line: -Xms128M -Xmx512M (This amount of memory seems to work well for me.)
• Disable the tomcat6 java security manager by changing the following line from the default '=yes' to: TOMCAT6_SECURITY=no.  I'm no java security expert but from my reading this default setting is probably overkill and the webapp won't run with it turned on. Please correct me if there's a better way.

• Add a user to tomcat with admin and manager roles so you can access the web-manager

sudo nano /etc/tomcat6/tomcat-users.xml

Restart the services:

• Restart apache

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

• Restart tomcat

sudo /etc/init.d/tomcat6 restart

 Note: if you get the message "Could not reliably determine the server’s fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1 for ServerName" starting Apache, then you need to edit /etc/apache2/httpd.conf (which will initially be empty) to contain the one line
    ServerName localhost

Then restart apache and the error should not appear.

Now we are ready to install OpenVPMS

Firstly, need to get the IP address of your server? Use the ifconfig command. 

OpenVPMS installation instructions to follow