Installing the Sheetster Mindtouch Addon

Owned by Robert Avery
Oct 24, 2012

The current DocsFree Sheetster MindTouch  Add-On has been tested with the MindTouch Platform v10 VM.

Download the DocsFree Sheetster MindTouch AddOn Now!




Installation
If you're on Linux and don't have an X server, you can launch the console installer to install the addon to your MindTouch server by calling:
sh install.bin -i consoleYou can accept the defaults for most of the installer. If you're not on the VM you should probably check that the MindTouch web directory is correct.

In the "Network Settings" section, the installer will prompt you for the host name. We normally autodetect the machine's IP and use it as the default value. On the MindTouch VM it currently detects the IP as 127.0.0.1. As the address needs to be externally accessible that won't work. You'll have to enter the VM's external IP.

In order to support generating thumbnails on a headless Linux machine (like the VM) you'll have to install Xvfb, a lightweight virtual X server. On the VM you can do so though apt by calling:

   apt-get install xvfb
Unfortunately it doesn't come with an init script. You can start it from the command line by calling:

   Xvfb :0 >/dev/null 2>&1 & disown
Make sure the DISPLAY variable points at it by calling:

   export DISPLAY=:0.0
We're currently investigating bundling the Pure Java AWT library, which would remove the need for an X server for thumbnail rendering.

Launching the Server
To start the Sheetster server, change to the installation directory and run the "Sheetster_Server" executable. If you're on Linux and accepted the installer defaults, you can do so by calling:

   cd /opt/MindTouch_Sheetster_AddOn   ./Sheetster_Server & disown
We are working on an init script to do this automatically when the installer completes and on system boot.

If everything worked correctly, the DocsFree Sheetster Add-On should now be installed and running. When an Excel file is attached to a MindTouch page, a thumbnail will be displayed in the attachments table. When you click on the thumbnail or select "Edit Excel Doc" in the file's action menu, the Sheetster editor will open in a thick box. Clicking "Save" in the Sheetster menu will attach a new version of the file with your changes.