oaicat under ubuntu

I tried to install tomcat on my laptop and it doesn't work. I don't know why. On the pc at work it worked after a few minutes. Now, I gave up and tried to install oaicat on my ubuntu linux today.

I use the ubuntu package for tomcat. The start script works nicely, but it does not really comply with the warning from the oaicat page:

Caveat! This webapp assumes that Tomcat will be started from the CATALINA_HOME subdirectory. If these pages appear, but the servlets invoked from the forms below fail, chances are you started Tomcat from a different location. In this case, edit the webapps/oaicat/WEB-INF/web.xml file and change the following relative reference to an absolute file path.

<param-value>webapps/oaicat/WEB-INF/oaicat.properties</param-value>

So I had to change the following lines in both web.xml and oaicat.properties to make it work:

web.xml:

 <context-param>
      <param-name>properties</param-name>
      <param-value>/var/lib/tomcat6/webapps/oaicat/WEB-INF/oaicat.properties</param-value>
      <description>
        The location of the oaicat.properties file containing
        datapairs used to initialize the OAI repository software.
      </description>
    </context-param>

oaicat.properties

FileSystemOAICatalog.homeDir=/var/lib/tomcat6/webapps/oaicat/WEB-INF/META/

FileMap2oai_dc.xsltName=/var/lib/tomcat6/webapps/oaicat/WEB-INF/etdms2dc.xsl

Leave the xsl like it is:

OAIHandler.styleSheet=/oaicat/oaicat.xsl

Watchout that these files are readable by tomcat after editing and restart with

/etc/init.d/tomcat6 restart