I just finished installing Movable Type

Welcome to my new blog powered by Movable Type. Finally got it up and running but it took me a few hours. Cutting the long story short, here is a note of what problems I had and how they were solved.

Since there was no Movable Type package for Ubuntu 8.04 I downloaded version 4.23 from http://www.movabletype.org/ and unpacked it locally. Then I created /usr/lib/cgi-bin/movabletype/ folder, copied in there *.cgi files from /path/to/movabletype/ and made symlinks to these folders

/usr/lib/cgi-bin/movabletype/default_templates -> /path/to/movabletype/default_templates
/usr/lib/cgi-bin/movabletype/lib              -> /path/to/movabletype/lib
/usr/lib/cgi-bin/movabletype/plugins          -> /path/to/movabletype/plugins
/usr/lib/cgi-bin/movabletype/tmpl             -> /path/to/movabletype/tmpl

I already had Apache configured so it was time to start the installation wizard. But after typing http://milen.commsen.com/cgi-bin/movabletype/mt.cgi in Firefox I got:

Got an error: Base class package "Class::Accessor::Fast" is empty.
   (Perhaps you need to 'use' the module which defines that package first.)

Took me a while to figure out the name of the package containing this Perl module but once it was discovered

apt-get install libclass-accessor-perl

solved this issue and made room for t the next one:

Got an error: Base class package "Data::ObjectDriver::BaseObject" is empty.
  (Perhaps you need to 'use' the module which defines that package first.)

The same problem, just different module, except this time there was no Ubuntu package for it. So I had to install it from CPAN, which was quite easy to do using cpan command.

bash$ cpan

cpan shell -- CPAN exploration and modules installation (v1.7602)
ReadLine support available (try 'install Bundle::CPAN')

cpan>

I then typed

cpan> install Data::ObjectDriver

and after a while got this message:

*** Checking for Perl dependencies...
[Core Features]
- Test::Exception                  ...missing.
- DBI                              ...loaded. (1.601)
- Class::Accessor::Fast            ...loaded. (0.31)
- Class::Data::Inheritable         ...missing.
- Class::Trigger                   ...missing.
- List::Util                       ...loaded. (1.18)
==> Auto-install the 3 mandatory module(s) from CPAN? [y]

Since missing modules depend on other missing modules I just let cpan handle dependencies and few minutes later problem was solved and now I had:

Got an error: mutiple trigger registration in one add_trigger() call is deprecated.

Thanks to Google I found the solution in another blog entry called "Movable Type with Class::Trigger 0.12" and after changing

MT::Placement->add_trigger(
    post_save   => \&flush_category_cache,
    post_remove => \&flush_category_cache
);

to

MT::Placement->add_trigger(
    post_save   => \&flush_category_cache
);
MT::Placement->add_trigger(
    post_remove => \&flush_category_cache
);

in MT/Entry.pm I finally got installation wizard running. At some point, after checking for required modules, the wizard complained about missing Image::Size and I had had to do

apt-get install libimage-size-perl.

There was also warning about missing optional modules so I also installed:

libmail-sendmail-perl
libsoap-lite-perl
libxml-atom-perl
perlmagick
libgd-gd2-noxpm-perl

Rest of configuration process went without problems but after completing the wizard I got:

Got an error: Can't locate YAML/Tiny.pm in @INC ...

Another Perl module missing? Looks like wizard didn't check for this one. So

apt-get install libyaml-tiny-perl

added it but then another one showed up:

Got an error: Can't locate JSON.pm in @INC

This was fixed by

apt-get install libjson-perl

and finally there was "Create Your Account" screen. Creating an account and adding a blog went without problems and I was able to move my old posts from Blogger and add this one.