Whew. That was intense.
A bare bones installation of Fedora 3.3 is up and running on the GCM server. Address is http://10.10.24.35:8080/fedora if you’re in Goodwill’s network, authentication required. Installation was actually relatively painless, and took about 1/30 the time I spent setting up a default install of DSpace last year. I’m not sure why this is, DSpace is suppose to be the more plug and playable repository software. A key difference here: there is absolutely nothing you can do with Fedora right now; with DSpace you could start building communities and collections from the start.
Fedora is using our regular old MySQL instance to store its information. This will work fine. The next step will be to set up some basic services and become familiar with FOXML, the XML format Fedora uses to describe its digital objects. From there we can begin creating our schema and doing some simple test runs. When this is going smoothly enough, we can think more about putting in hooks into the Semantic Web (such as it stands) by pointing to elements in Dublin Core, Friend of a Friend, or other ontologies.
One final prerequisite that does need to get up as soon as possible is regular backup of the server. Our present MySQL database is mailed weekly to a couple different computers, so that data is fairly secure. But the drive running our server has no redundancy, so we’re not as secure as we should be.
Walker Sampson 