[Digitalarchivists] the spreads stuff.

[miloh]

Y'all,

FYI I just returned the canon cameras to the DA locker, so they aren't
currently installed in the second bookscanner. I wanted to write and
update y'all on what I've found out about Spreads.

I'm interested in using this Spreads* project so the process of
working with the bookscanners can fan out a bit via a browser based
interface.  While some folks are scanning, others could be looking at
the content served by the spreads flask webserver, seeing other books
that were scanned and made available over the 'life' of the
bookscanner.  Others could be using the static site as a launchpad to
look at howtos and documentation for using the scanner and learning
about sharing



Spreads installed with virtualenv and pip and minimal changes to host system:

I've been working for awhile to get the cameras working with spreads
installed in a virtualenv** with pip***.  It works and runs, but the
python Flask webserver wasn't loading as of last night. It did start,
but loads a blank page. I think is a really basic problem that will be
easily solved. My guess is the directory paths for static web assets
(images/text,etc) were confused, and that this can be quickly cleared
up with testing on a different system. Advice, duplication tests, and
ideas would be appreciated. I'm working on a fork at
https://github.com/miloh/spreads. I'd like to see spreads on the
beagleboneBlack, in addition to 'spreadspi'.



Spreads installed using README.rst instructions:

Spreads works fine on my laptop. In the end, just getting 'spreads
web' to run on my system without a virtualenv was easy. I'm including
a snippet of my history to show the steps I took. These instructions
are straight out of the spreads README.rst included with the spreads
project on github***, but note I'm not installing Spreads from that
repo, I'm using the 'spreads-nightly' buildbot build (see the tar file
at step 2008)


 2000  sudo apt-get install python2.7-dev
 2001  sudo apt-get install python-pip
 2002  sudo apt-get install build-essential
 2003  sudo apt-get install pkg-config
 2004  sudo pip install lupa --install-option="--no-luajit"
 2005  sudo pip install chdkptp.py
 2006  sudo pip install jpegtran-cffi Flask
 2007  sudo pip install requests zipstream tornado Wand
 2008  sudo pip install
http://buildbot.diybookscanner.org/nightly/spreads-latest.tar.gz
 2009  spread configure
 2010  spread web


Using:
Canon PowerShot A2500 cameras
sdcards running CHDK v1.3.0-4169
Spreads from 6/25 buildbot (for systemwide install) and spreads
v0.4.2-955-g28a2780 (for work with virtualenv)
Debian system (3.2.0-4-rt)


-rma


* https://github.com/diybookscanner/spreads  my fork with tiny install
based changes: https://github.com/miloh/spreads

** virtualenv is a python utility that allows one to create an
isolated environment for testing, so I don't spoil my system testings
and have a better chance of creating a simple install process for
others.

*** pip is a python package manager