Hi all

this is my first post here. I was lured to Tracks mostly through screens with a beatifully simple, yet functional user interface. To cut a long story short, this impression has not changed.

I thought I’d share the experience I gathered while getting tracks to run hoping that this will be of some help to others.

I mostly followed Jacken’s blog but found out I needed to deviate from his advice a couple of times to get tracks up and running.

1) perhaps most importantly: The most recent version of Locomotive (version 2.08) will not let me run Tracks. I did not investigate further because downloading 2.07 does the trick. It is slightly annoying that the reminder box will pop up when launching Locomotive no matter whether you requested new version search in the prefs or not.

2) There is no environment.yml. Just ignore.

3) Don’t forget to create a log directory!

4) I had to use the full path, not a tilde sign for my home directory.
The easiest way for the technically challenged would probably be to open a terminal window and drag the file into it. This will create a ful path which you can copy and paste into the database.yml

Otherwise, Jacken’s description was very helpful, follow it to the letter.

5) This is more a “keeping it running” tip but here goes anyway:
You can totally avoid the following problem by using Camino or Firefox.
When using Safari, every second “next action” entered would result in a server error ocurring with no action being entered.
Workaround if you abolutely have to use Safari: To avoid typing everything again, you’d need to click “add next action” again which results in the text disappearing but fet not, clicking it (yet) again presents you with all the text as you entered and no more server errors. Still annoying.

My questions:
No idea why this is happening with Safari. Anyone?
What is causing the incompatibility of Tracks and Locomotive 2.08?

For most of you, this will be stating the obvious but Tracks carries the cliche of being nice but difficult to install. IMO this is not true (see above) although some of the installation could be streamlined further.
Why add the *.tmpl tag in the first place and force anyone to rename the folders?

Ok, off to play some more. Oh, and thanks for making it available, much appreciated.

Prion

Prion - 08 March 2007 12:28 PM

this is my first post here. I was lured to Tracks mostly through screens with a beatifully simple, yet functional user interface. To cut a long story short, this impression has not changed.

Prion - 08 March 2007 12:28 PM

1) perhaps most importantly: The most recent version of Locomotive (version 2.08) will not let me run Tracks. I did not investigate further because downloading 2.07 does the trick. It is slightly annoying that the reminder box will pop up when launching Locomotive no matter whether you requested new version search in the prefs or not.

As it happens, I’ve been messing about a bit with Locomotive myself recently. I also found that 2.0.8 didn’t run out of the box, but there’s an easy fix, as it happens. Set up an entry for Tracks as usual, and click Run. When you go to the browser, you’ll see an error. Don’t panic! Stop the server, then look inside the config folder inside Tracks. You should see a locomotive.yml file. Open this and add at the very end:


  server: lighttpd


save the file then click Run again. It should work now.

Prion - 08 March 2007 12:28 PM

4) I had to use the full path, not a tilde sign for my home directory.
The easiest way for the technically challenged would probably be to open a terminal window and drag the file into it. This will create a ful path which you can copy and paste into the database.yml

Perhaps this has changed in the latest version, but there’s now a ‘Choose’ button on that dialog which opens a standard Mac file chooser, so it’s very easy to pick the Tracks folder.

Prion - 08 March 2007 12:28 PM

5) This is more a “keeping it running” tip but here goes anyway:
You can totally avoid the following problem by using Camino or Firefox.
When using Safari, every second “next action” entered would result in a server error ocurring with no action being entered.
Workaround if you abolutely have to use Safari: To avoid typing everything again, you’d need to click “add next action” again which results in the text disappearing but fet not, clicking it (yet) again presents you with all the text as you entered and no more server errors. Still annoying.

Yes, that’s a known issue. It’s fixed in the trunk, so it won’t be a problem in the next release.

Prion - 08 March 2007 12:28 PM

For most of you, this will be stating the obvious but Tracks carries the cliche of being nice but difficult to install. IMO this is not true (see above) although some of the installation could be streamlined further.
Why add the *.tmpl tag in the first place and force anyone to rename the folders?

Making the process much more transparent is a definite goal for the next release. For example, I’m going to provide a pre-prepared zip file (including a pre-made SQLite3 db) especially for Locomotive users, so that the installation process will just be: install Locomotive, unzip Tracks and place it in your home directory, point Locomotive at Tracks, click Run. Done. The *.tmpl extension needs to be there in the SVN repository, because otherwise all of the developers’ own configurations (including their MySQL passwords etc.) would end up in the public repository - not a good idea. But you’re right that these should be fixed for the zip packages.