When Brazil’s Association of Archivists first invited me to speak at their congress, I offered to supplement my conference presentation with a half-day workshop dealing in some detail with our digital preservation software. Ideally I wanted people to bring in their laptops so that after demonstrating the operation of our software, I could help people to install and configure their own copies of the system to learn from. Aside from bringing their own computers, we decided that it would be useful if participants could be fluent in English because no translation would be available and I speak no Portuguese. A total of ten people pre-registered for my seminar and a handful more turned up on the day.

Anyway, the day started with another session of talks in the main auditorium with simultaneous translation. I sat at the front with my headset on and the netbook on my lap. I decided to make a quick check to see that all of my software components were in place for the afternoon’s workshop so I used one of the memory sticks full of our code that I’d brought along to give away and set about unzipping and trying out software. I quickly ran into a problem when I found that a couple of the bzip files on the memory stick wouldn’t unzip. These were files I had downloaded from our sourceforge site in Canberra less than a week ago. Perhaps I messed up the download? With free hotel wireless available from my auditorium seat I decided to use the local Brazilian sourceforge mirror to download the files again. It took a few minutes but it soon became evident that some of the bzips at sourceforge were broken. I emailed the team back home to take a look but knew I’d be on my own for a while due to the 13 hour time difference.

The morning’s presentations included one by another of the overseas guests, Professor Bruno Delmas from France. His talk was made doubly interesting to me because of what the translators told me immediately before it. Apparently, only one of the translators was fluent in French. So he would be creating a simultaneous translation from French into Portuguese and his colleague would listen to the Portuguese and render it into English in parallel. This ‘Chinese Whispers’ form of simultaneous translation resulted in an interesting set of words that sometimes almost made sense but I think I’ll need to seek an English copy of Professor Bruno’s paper in order to properly understand his musings on the dematerialisation of the document.

I left the morning session early and returned to my hotel room to assess all of the pieces of software I had brought along and to attempt to build the missing pieces from source. Most things were working and the only obviously broken pieces would not affect anyone at the workshop unless they were Linux or Mac users wanting to install only one software component. I figured correctly that the risk in that case was quite small. For the workshop, I changed from my suit to my National Archives of Australia Xena Digital Preservation shirt. A little bit of marketing can go a long way.

There was some initial confusion in the seminar room when the infrastructure people wanted to insist on me using their computer rather than mine to do all of my demonstrations, but we eventually sorted that out and I managed to get the netbook talking to their projector and plugged into power for the long haul. People trickled into the room and I was gratified to see that my audience would consist of nearly all of the invited speakers, some Brazil and Santos archives people and the event organisers. All of them understood English and most were able to converse in English.

For those who hadn’t seen my keynote and to reinforce the concepts for those who had, I started with a brief slide presentation explaining the NAA approach to digital preservation. This led naturally into a demonstration of Xena and a bit of an exploration of the various outputs created during a Xena process. Next up I detailed each of the steps of processing a digital records transfer into a digital archive and this led to a detailed demonstration of the Manifest Maker and a full run through of the DPR. With everyone on the same page in terms of the operation of the software I checked to see what operating systems we might be installing on. Everybody had brought along machines running one variant or another of MS Windows.

Johanna Smit from São Paulo University volunteered the use of her new EePC netbook for me to demonstrate the use of our all-in-one DPSP installer and I connected it to the projector. I displayed and explained the contents of the memory sticks that I’d given out and walked through a software installation while others followed along on their own machines. Annoyingly, some quirk of the Windows setup on Johanna’s netbook prevented the menu entries for our software from pointing to the new installation but this issue didn’t occur on any other machines. I overcame it with some manual intervention but it made an otherwise smooth demonstration just a little less smooth.

The session concluded with some excellent discussion of the limits of our capacity to process digital records and some speculation on what factors may influence our ability to scale up our operations in future. The participants seemed generally impressed with the polished look of our software and our documentation. The test now will be to see if anyone goes away to play some more and contacts us as a result.

With my day one keynote behind me and my day three workshop off in the future, day two would be my day to take in some of the congress and hopefully get outside the hotel for a quick look around.

Having chatted over dinner with Professor Geoffrey Yeo, I was keenly anticipating his paper presentation. He did not disappoint. Drawing on a great British tradition of academic oratory, Professor Yeo delivered a cogent, clever, nuanced and challenging argument in support of the uniqueness of instances of digital records.

I’ll admit I was caught between furiously scribbling several pages of notes and just admiring his skill as a presenter. The subject matter happened to be close to my personal interests in digital preservation, so I was engrossed. At times I found myself in disagreement with his suggestions, but more often in vehement agreement, particularly when he concluded that it is “…impossible to have a complete list of significant properties [of digital objects] because they are contingent on user perception…” Oh yeah - testify! Take that, all you significant properties adherents!

His exploration of the concept of uniqueness or originality is one that has not received enough intelligent assessment in the digital domain, and it’s past due for careful consideration. I have long advocated that we cannot know what facet of a digital record will be important to a future researcher. Aspects other than obvious content may assume more importance than we currently imagine.

It’s fair to say that Professor Yeo’s talk rather eclipsed the remainder of the morning for me.

In the afternoon I returned to my room to do some further preparation for my workshop, then changed into shorts and T Shirt for a look at the Atlantic ocean. The beach front was a two block walk and I crossed the wide sand to touch the Atlantic for the first time.

The weather was warm but the heavy haze made it not quite what I would call beach weather. A queue of huge transport ships were just visible off shore, lining up to enter the port of Santos. I walked the sand for a kilometre or so, looking at the trolleys of the mobile beverage vendors with their collections of folding chairs for their customers to sit at. In the distance I saw what I thought were a pair of Lifesaver ’swim between’ flags, but when I got there I found that they were each a different design and were the advertising flags of two different beach trolleys.

I crossed back from the beach to the famous beach front garden and I marveled at the paving which looks like mosaic ceramic tiles. Most of the pavement along streets is similar to this:

Having seen quite a few potholes in footpaths, I wondered at the fragility of paving with ceramic tiles. Then I discovered that it’s actually done with bricks of different types of rock:

That made more sense.

I had thought I might walk up to the Historical district to see the coffee museum and other historical attractions, but I was running out of daylight and energy, so I shelved those for another day.

A good night’s sleep made a huge difference and I awoke refreshed, hungry and thirsty. Reading through the English bits of the hotel literature I figured out that breakfast could be had one floor down from me in the Garden restaurant and I set off to find it. I managed to enter the restaurant by the wrong door, thereby bypassing the person who was supposed to check that I’m a hotel guest and I set about understanding the variety of foods in the buffet breakfast. Fruit, cereals, a bewildering array of baked goods and a couple of fairly plain hot dishes. Scrambled eggs I’m familiar with, but sliced frankfurt sausages in hot tomato sauce were new to me. The fresh strawberry juice and the coffee were a treat though.

Suitably fortified I returned to my room to dress for my keynote. I pulled out the dress shirt I’d never worn and the suit I’d bought four days ago and hoped everything fit. It pretty well did and with my presentation slides on a memory stick in my pocket and my conference paper in hand, I set off to locate the part of the hotel where the event was set up.

I arrived early enough that the English speaking main organiser hadn’t yet arrived and I used a combination of gesture and fragments of French/English/Portuguese to hand a copy of my slides to the media person for loading to the big screens. So far so good.

While I was standing around looking lost, I was approached by two rather dapper chaps who introduced themselves as the simultaneous translators who would be turning my words into Portuguese and giving me an English translation of the Portuguese via headphones through all the sessions. They implored me to speak slowly but predicted that I almost certainly wouldn’t.

After a little while, my host Lucia Maria Velloso de Oliveira arrived and we met for the first time. She was quick to check that I had all I needed and that the media people had my presentation. As Lucia started to tell me of some of the other foreign guests, Professor Tom Nesmith from the University of Manitoba arrived. We were introduced and immediately launched into a discussion around our individual interests in the world of archives.

While we were chatting, the lights in the main auditorium shifted to highlight the stage and Lucia took the podium to begin introducing keynote speakers. I then realised that when I heard my name I should walk on to the stage and be seated at the big table with the other two international keynotes. Besides a microphone, I had a small radio receiver and a headset that would give me the English translation transmitted from the booth at the rear of the auditorium.

The opening talk was by Francisco Barbedo from Archives Portugal, introducing their RODA software for digital preservation. I am somewhat familiar with RODA and I was keen to know more, but whether it was Francisco’s delivery or the Portuguese to English translation, I found myself more confused than when he started. Several times he alluded to things that he said he either lacked the time or the knowledge to explain, so the best I can tell, RODA is a set of services built on a Fedora Commons platform, with ftp ingest of records, LDAP authentication for users, and an on-the-fly conversion from PDF to flash (?) for viewing. I was itching to ask Francisco why their source code is a 4 gigabyte download, but I got the sense that he wouldn’t understand the question and I didn’t want to embarrass him.

The second keynote was from Claudia Lacomb Rocha from Arcquivo Nacional, Brasil (aka the Brazilian National Archives). The thrust of her talk was that they have just started looking into digital preservation, and Claudia outlined the 13 research projects that they are kicking off in order to understand the whole area. From my perspective, this looks like yet another example of an institution setting out to reinvent the wheel from first principles, but I am somewhat heartened to see that one of the projects involves a trip to Europe to see what the Dutch and the Danes are doing.

Next up was me. I grabbed a copy of my paper, The Benefit of Experience: the first four years of digital archiving at the National Archives of Australia and went to the lectern. Looking out at the audience was somewhat disconcerting. The bright light from the videographer’s camera was aimed at me, making most of the audience invisible. As people realised that I would be speaking English, there was a mad scramble to obtain headsets to hear the simultaneous translation. Mindful of the translators’ wish that I speak slowly, I launched carefully into my talk.

It’s a lot harder presenting when there’s no audience feedback. My slight attempts at humour, even the visual joke or two in my slides, fell pretty flat. Being barely able to see the audience, eye contact was almost impossible, so it felt a bit like being in my own little world and talking to a bright light. I concentrated on keeping the pacing slow and on following the thread of the narrative embodied by my paper without reading directly from the paper - embroidering the story with anecdotal flavour. I know that once I warm to a theme I can easily run over time, but I was watching the clock and I managed to finish with five minutes in hand.

In the panel discussion that followed, I was surprised to find that my Brazilian and Portuguese co-speakers were more than ready to defer audience questions to me, in spite of the resulting clash of languages. Two themes emerged in the questioning - one around the use of digital signatures to authenticate digital records and the other around the acquisition or development by archival institutions of skills in the digital area to complement existing archival skills.

The end of the panel debate heralded lunch and coincided with the arrival of another English speaking presenter, Professor Geoffrey Yeo from University College London.

After lunch I retrieved a translation headset and settled in the auditorium to observe the afternoon session. Physicist Dr Luis Fernando Sayão from the Brazilian Nuclear Commission delivered an enthusiastic and dynamic presentation on the need to rethink the scope and depth of metadata in the digital space as compared with the non-digital space. His theme was that more than just describing a resource, metadata needs to be expanded to encompass structure, IP rights, relationships and rendering technologies.

Dr Luis was followed by Carlos Ditadi from Arquivo Nacional Brazil who introduced his talk on the digitisation of paper records with some wonderful images from an 1895 publication, The End of Books. The illustrations provided some 19th century perspective on the perceived dangers hidden in ‘new technologies’.

With the day’s presentations completed, I began to think of dinner, but there was more to come. First, a string quartet set themselves up and began to play.

Their efforts were followed by the official opening of the Congress with dignitaries, speeches, the National Anthem and video presentations on Santos and on the work of the local archives.

The taxi collected me from home at first light on Monday morning for the trip to the airport. I was pleased to see that there was no hint of fog and there was an excellent chance that my flight would be on time. It was. Contrary to what my ticket told me, I wasn’t boarding a prop driven Bombardier, but a nice big 737 jet. I took my aisle seat in the second row from the rear and watched the plane fill to about half capacity. I began to think of moving across to the empty window seat on my left when the very last passenger boarded and took it. Darn.

The big jet made short work of the hop to Sydney and I disembarked directly opposite the international transfer lounge where I waited about 15 minutes for a bus to be crammed full of passengers for the short jaunt to the international terminal. Security and passport control took just moments and I was into the departure area with plenty of time to spare. I made the mistake of buying a coffee there. Somehow the barista managed to turn it into dishwater and I ditched it after one mouthful.

The Qantas 747-400ER boarded on time and I found myself way down the back in the middle of the central aisle in the part of economy where people with babies sit. Oh joy. My legs aren’t made for squeezing into such a space and the next 13 hours or so would be most uncomfortable. We departed only minutes late and headed south east just to one side of the South Pole for the flight to Buenos Aires.

A couple of hours into the flight, a woman seated to my left took ill and requested water from the flight attendant. As the water arrived she slumped unconscious, fitted for a moment and became unresponsive. The attendant and I tried “shake and shout” to get her to revive, but her open eyes stared vacantly into space. She looked dead. After half a minute or so she regained a little consciousness and the cabin crew put her on oxygen. Once she could talk and admitted to suffering chronic low blood pressure, the crew moved her forward to a nice business class bed for the remainder of the flight.

That was the end of the in-flight excitement and I settled in to read a book and watch crappy movies for a long, long time (about 13 hours). We crossed into darkness mid-afternoon and I tried to sleep without any real success. A few hours later we were back into the light and it was again Monday morning. Being in the middle of the plane I had no view outside so I missed our crossing the Andes if that was visible.

We dropped through haze into Buenos Aires and landed at an airport reminiscent of Brisbane with similar vegetation around the boundary. Once we disembarked, the resemblance faded with the rusty old airport smelling of cigarettes. My next flight would be on British Airways and as I left the plane I heard a uniformed airline person repeating the mantra “Breeteesh Airways, Breeteesh Airways.” I figured that might mean me and showed her my boarding pass. She swapped my Qantas one for a British Airways one and directed me through a security scanner where I didn’t need to get my laptop out of my bag. A long walk around full length of the rather dingy corridors of the airport ensued and I found myself inside a small duty free shopping area near the gate lounges.

The two hour hop to Guarulhos airport at São Paulo was on a British Airways 747-400 bound for Heathrow via Brazil. This time I scored a window seat but with haze near the ground and cloud up high, there were no views to be had until final approach into Guarulhos. What I saw then was amazing to me. The massively sprawling city of São Paulo is the biggest I have ever seen. Not surprising really, since it has a population of roughly half the total population of Australia. I have never seen so much high-rise spread over so much area.

I was off the plane and through passport control within ten minutes of landing, then I waited forever at the baggage carousel for my suitcase - the very last bag unloaded. So when I breezed through Customs I was the last passenger out and I was met by two very patient women holding up a sign with my name on it. One was a young and very pretty translator from the tourist bureau and the other was an older woman who was to be my driver. Vanessa (was that her name, I didn’t quite catch it) told me that the drive to Santos may take 2 hours and advised me to use the bathroom before we left, so I took that advice and also sought a bilingual ATM to extract some local cash.

My first culture shock was when they ushered me into the front seat of a Honda. I was to sit on the right as I usually do at home, but in this car the steering wheel was on the ‘wrong’ side. So that felt odd. We set off onto Guarulhos’ large freeway system and started dodging Brazilian traffic for the trip to the coast. Every impression now was fresh and strange to my Australian eyes. Each traffic light intersection had street vendors approaching stopped cars to sell snacks, drinks, mobile phone accessories and even children’s bicycle tyres. At one point we were stopped and a motorbike whizzed past and threw a big piece of plastic bodywork at a man standing in the middle of the road. It bounced off our roof with a bang and its intended target shook his head and picked it up.

Buses, trucks and tiny 150cc motorbikes were everywhere and competing madly for road space. The little motorbikes carved up the traffic incessantly and later we had to deviate around a fresh single-vehicle motorbike crash.

After a little more than an hour we had skirted the edge of São Paulo on six lane roads and cruised through green countryside past a huge dam. This gave way to the coastal mountains that we would have to descend to get to Santos. The winding mountain roads have recently been replaced with massive 2 and 3km tunnels which bore straight down through the mountains to sea level, making for a quick trip but sacrificing what may be some great views.

Traveling on roads that in Australia would be regarded as ‘freeways’ it was very disconcerting to see people wandering around on the central reservation and along the road edges. Kids on bikes riding along the edges in both directions, people running or walking with no provision really made for pedestrians and often no obvious place that they could be heading to.

Santos is actually on an island, but it’s far from obvious when you cross the river from the mainland and apparently many Brazilians don’t realise that it’s an island city. As we drove past the edge of a huge Shipping Container terminal, Vanessa was explaining the scale and importance of shipping in the area. Then she asked me, “What is the most populous port in Australia?” I rambled on for a bit about Port Botany and Port Melbourne then digressed to talk about the various large coal export terminals up the east coast. She took a moment to digest all of this, then said “Thank you, but I asked you What is the most popular sport in Australia?”

By now it was late afternoon and we pulled up in front of the Mendes Panorama hotel. I grabbed my bags and Vanessa accompanied me to the reception desk where I checked in. We said goodbye and I think I upset a porter when I said I’d be fine with my bag. I pressed the button for the lift and both arrived at once. As I stepped to the one on the left, a porter was walking to the one on the right and I *think* he was asking me what floor I wanted as I disappeared into the other lift. Oh well, I don’t think I made any friends there.

My room on the 8th floor was pleasant enough and I wasted no time in getting a shower. While the thought of dinner was tempting, I was too tired to move and decided on an early night. Just as I dropped off to sleep, the phone in the room rang with the conference organiser urging me to join a small group for dinner. I pleaded exhaustion and begged off. I’m glad I did because I slept like a log and awoke feeling refreshed for my keynote on day one of the conference.

For various reasons I have been a couple of years behind the curve on this particular machine. In fact it has been running Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 with a 2.6.24 kernel and KDE 3.5. So it’s old and well past its Use By date. The boot disk is a 20G Western Digital IDE device made on the 18th of December 2000. A few years ago I added a 250G WD IDE as a data drive and it’s almost full.

So I bought a nice new 1.5TB WD SATA drive and resolved to install a new system.

First, I found the few things on the 20G boot drive that I still cared about and copied them to the 250G drive. Then I pulled the machine down, removed the 20G drive and installed the 1.5T drive. I sometimes use a netbook with Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx and I quite like it so I downloaded a USB installer image of that to a 4G USB stick. It didn’t boot past the Ubuntu splash screen.

Sigh. Okay, my CPU is an Intel dual core E2160 and that’s a 64 bit beastie so I downloaded the x86_64 version and whacked that on the USB stick. It didn’t get past the splash screen either. Not good.

My dislike for RPM based Linux systems is something I have never hidden, but in desperation I swallowed my pride and downloaded a Fedora 13 installer image and put that on the USB stick. It worked. Well, sort of.

Fedora 13 installed and gave me a bootable system, but with some things not working and with some fundamental tools missing.

Chris was delighted. He’s currently a Fedora devotee and gleefully handed me a Fedora 13 DVD to sort me out. He (and I) assumed that my USB installer wasn’t quite right and a DVD with everything on it would get me going.

Except it didn’t. My system wouldn’t boot from the DVD. I messed with boot order in the BIOS but no matter what I did the system would boot to its half baked Fedora desktop where I could see, browse and open files on the very DVD it refused to boot from. So Chris made me a new DVD, verified it and booted a system from it. And it didn’t work for me.

Now I should confess here that my DVD reader is a faintly odd and rather old Panasonic LF-D321 which was marketed as an IDE DVD-RAM device many years ago. With nothing making any sense, I headed down to the Computer Fair and bought a new SATA ASUS DVD reader-writer-RAM-what-have-you for the princely sum of $25 (less than 10% of the price of the Panasonic). I set it up to read the Fedora DVD and… it didn’t.

This was all rapidly heading into Insanity territory and I performed quite a few reboots with different BIOS settings and much head scratching ensued. Finally, I took a magazine cover DVD containing an Ubuntu 10.04 installer ISO, booted my broken Fedora installation, copied it from the DVD, then burned it to a blank DVD-R. And that worked!

The system booted from that DVD when it wouldn’t boot the Fedora DVDs (which it could read though) and I very soon had a working machine. I pointed the updater at my ISP’s mirror and brought everything up to date then installed KDE.

Ahh, all’s well. A little bit of fettling Firefox with Adblock Plus, X-Marks and Download Statusbar. Add the old 250G drive to fstab via its UUID and get Amarok to rescan my music collection. Bliss.

Peter Heal is hours away from completing the fastest ever circumnavigation of the Australian continent under his own steam. Pete left Sydney on the 2nd of May, 2010 to ride around Australia. The record stands at 51 days, 47 minutes for the agreed route. Pete aims to crack 50 days.

A Spot Tracker shows Pete’s position at all times: http://trackleaders.com/aroundozi.php?name=Peter_Heal

Most long distance bike rides rely on a support crew with food, water, spare parts, massage, logistics and any sort of care you might imagine. Not Pete. He relies on himself.

Pete has been in the driving seat from day one. He knows the magnitude of the task and has settled in to do it. The rest of us can only watch and learn.

I know that I will spend tomorrow monitoring the Spot tracker and urging him on.

In theory, the idea that you can carry the full text of many books in the same physical space as any paper printed book looks like nirvana. I love books and I read them daily. I often wish that I could get access to my books when I’m not near a bookshelf. Surely an eBook reader is what I need.

But eBook readers are heavier than a book, have a limited battery life, don’t all work well in bright sunlight (some do) and often come with nasty proprietary rights management restrictions on what you can do with digital books. They do retain the cachet of being pretty cool though.

For me, an eBook reader would be most useful when I’m forced to wait somewhere. In the queue at a government shopfront renewing my driving licence or registering my car. At my daughter’s dance lesson. I’d slip my hand into the cavernous pocket of my frock coat and… hang on. I don’t wear a frock coat. Where the heck would I slip an eBook?

I do have a phone though. Mine is an HTC Magic phone based on the Android OS. It’s in my pocket all day. It has a bright and clear 320 x 480 screen. I grabbed the free Aldiko eBook reader software from the Android Marketplace and now my phone is an eBook reader.

And I have read several books using just my phone - mostly while waiting for things or filling in time. The fact that it’s in my pocket and is always ready makes it incredibly useful. Would I like a bigger screen? Of course I would but not at the expense of pocket space.

I can’t get this week’s top 10 best selling novels via Aldiko’s auto download and that’s a relief. I do have access to thousands of titles of free content though. That’ll do me for a pocket miracle.

The survey isn’t perfect. Several people have pointed out ways in which the questions don’t make sense or the fact that submitting from outside Australia isn’t properly acknowledged, but I ask you to give it your best shot. Please forgive any imperfections in the web forms. The LA council really wants to hear what you have to say.

And completely separate from the big picture LA stuff… are YOU working in a Government job (Local, State, Federal) and either using / writing / contributing to / thinking about Free and Open Source Software? Turns out there’s a nascent FOSS Community Of Interest being nurtured inside AGIMO and I’m on it. If you’d like to know what we’re up to or (much better) be a part of it, ping me. Do you know someone who should be involved with a government body looking at this stuff? Again, ping me. The hardest part about gaining FOSS adoption in government is finding the people to talk to.

For years Pete has studied, built and ridden recumbent bikes. [full disclosure, he built mine] Many. many long distance bike rides have had Pete as either organiser or chief example of how fast a person can go.

Last year Pete rode from the Western Australian coast to the East coast at Bondi and set a new record for the unsupported crossing. At the time we joked “Pete, you should turn left and do a victory lap.”

The idea didn’t go away.

The current record for riding around Australia with no support is 51 days and 17 minutes. Unsupported means no following crew to help you. Just you and whatever you can do alone. Pete is aiming to crack 50 days.

Think about it. 15,000km out on the road, all made possible by your own effort. Riding over 300km a day, every day for week after week.

Those of us following his progress via GPS or reading updates on his Yahoo Group are stunned by his persistence and speed.

As I write this, Pete is just hours from the QLD / NT border and on schedule to do something so close enough to impossible that almost nobody can imagine it. Go Pete.

We started out with our Xena software which works out what format a digital object is and converts it to a standards based open format for preservation. Then we created our main workflow tool, the Digital Preservation Recorder (DPR) to manage the whole process of digital preservation and to collect an audit trail while doing so. To round out the suite we have the Manifest Maker app that prepares collections of digital data for processing and the Checksum Checker that keeps an eye on data integrity once lodged in the digital repository.

Xena is pretty popular and usually maintains 500~1000 downloads per month, but DPR is rather less so. Apart from the fact that Xena can be used via its API in many different situations, whereas DPR is tied to a very specific workflow, it has always been the case that setting up DPR has required quite a bit of computer savvy. To get DPR going you need to have Java installed, then ClamAV, OpenOffice and Postgres. Once you have Postgres installed you need to set up three separate databases and configure user permissions. All of this has made it more difficult than we’d like for people to set up and try our software.

So the team created an installer package. The package is a single download containing Xena, DPR, Manifest Maker and Checksum Checker along with Java, OpenOffice, ClamAV and Postgres. It also includes a quick start guide, comprehensive manuals for each of our pieces of software and automated updaters. At the moment, it’s a single Windows executable weighing in at about 400MB. For the time being, Linux and Mac users still need to install the various components individually but we’re working on packages there as well.

When you run the installer, it neatly installs everything you need and does all of the configuration for you. This used to take an hour or two for someone who knew exactly what they were doing. Now anyone can do it in just a few minutes.

If Digital Preservation interests you and you have a high bandwidth internet connection for the big download and a Windows PC (or virtual image of one), grab a copy of our GPL licensed installer package and give it a try. Then let us know what you think.