Running OpenERP on Ubuntu 9.04

The OpenERP server has some compatibility problems because it works only with python 2.5 and the deprecated PyXML library. Ubuntu 9.04 has python 2.6 as default and a broken PyXML (python-xml) package. Depedencies on the deprecated PyXML should be removed from OpenERP, anyway. The following instructions require more than basic level linux skills.

1. Solve the python 2.5 problem: Make sure you have python2.5 installed. sudo apt-get install python2.5 Then you have to be sure that the server starts with python2.5, not python (that's the 2.6 version). So if you have an openerp-server script, change the 'exec /usr/bin/python ./openerp-server.py' to 'exec /usr/bin/python2.5 ./openerp-server.py'
2. Solve python-xml. A file is missing from the python-xml package, boolean.so .That has to be compiled from source and copied to /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/oldxml/_xmlplus/utils . The instructions for compiling would be too long to describe here; If you write me here or on the irc channel, I'll send you my already compiled version or describe the necessary steps in detail.

p.s. I've just created a blueprint for python 2.6 support.

Update: Finally the deprecated libs were removed, the latest bzr 5.0 and trunk work on new Ubuntus.

New module: base_report_unicode

The final solution to the unicode printing problem many times mentioned in this blog! Simply install this module and your reports will have the truetype fonts needed. That's all, no patching, no tinkering with reportlab and the fonts:)
I've uploaded this module to the community addons mentioned in the previous post.

Where are the modules?

Just a reminder how the OpenObject module repositories are set up.
There are 3 categories with 3 levels of code quality review requirements:
The stable 5.0 official addons
The development official addons
are the modules bundled with OpenERP and these represent the core functionality. The OpenERP Quality Team is responsible.
The stable 5.0 extra addons
The development extra addons
is a large collection (~300) of modules from many contributors. They are usually of good quality but the strict review process is not needed. Members of the OpenERP Commiters team can upload here. OpenERP Commiters are more experienced users & developers.
The community addons
is a new repository. This is going to be a repository where everyone can upload his/her modules if he wants to make it publicly available. The OpenERP Community team is open to everyone.

Easier unicode reports

Some of you might remember the unicode reports problem that was my first post on this blog. Now I made a better solution. This automatically replaces the old fonts' names with the unicode ones in memory. The report files don't have to be modified.
The wiki mentioned in the original post has been updated with the new instructions.