ZoneMinder Forums

Ok so I have been trying to get this to work for almost 2 years. I have discovered that support is piss poor but the program is awsome. I have an older version 1.24.2 and montoge does not work. In the normal linux zoneminder fasion there is no explanation for this other than "at least it works now." I figure it is a browser error caused by running an older version of zoneminder. Everytime I try to download the tar.gz file it just opens a bunch of files... WTF. When I type apt-get zoneminder it installs a 2 year old version. Is there no quality control to this stuff?

I am also intrested in knowing how to update from "apt-get install zoneminder" v1.24.2 to the current 1.24.4

I have always used the apt-get install way of installing zoneminder as I am not a linux guru, and only know the basic command line stuff.

I look forward to more replies on this topic.

You can install from source, but it's not always a painless or trivial affair. I know several people who've tried it and got into a bit of a pickle.

I'm still running 1.24.2 on production servers (in fact, I only just retired a 1.24.1 this week) and it works fine. There's no "OMG, Must have!" feature on the new versions that make me want to upgrade /that/ much

Valuing reliability, I recommend sticking with that unless you're confident and competent with compiling programs. Zoneminder has many dependencies.

Peter Howard was doing the debian/ubuntu packaging. Not sure how that's going at the moment or even if there's a private repo somewhere with later versions packaged with dependancies?

I'm a little confused over your angle on this. If you do an apt-get install zoneminder, you are downloading the version of zoneminder that is in the repository. This is dependent upon your Linux distribution.

For example, the repositories don't change except with newer versions of your distro of choice (for the most part). Take Ubuntu for example. Ubuntu's 11.04 repository has 1.24.2 in it. Ubuntu 11.04 was released in April 2011. But 1.24.3 and 1.24.4 were released in May of 2011.

So let's think about this. If ZoneMinder 1.24.3 and 1.24.4 were released in May of 2011... but Ubuntu 11.04 was released in April of 2011... and the repositories don't change except with newer versions of Ubuntu... how can Ubuntu possibly have the newest versions included? My guess is Ubuntu 11.10 (the next version) would have 1.24.4 included in it, or even a newer version if it comes out prior to 11.10's release.

This unfortunately is where you need to install things manually if you want a version newer than what the repositories have. This is done by installing from source, which is said above. There should be documentation on how to install this from source, however I have not looked into this because I found 1.24.2 works fine for my uses, so I haven't spent too much time with looking at upgrading.

The biggest problem right now with ubuntu is that changed some stuff recently that slithery different that the norm on linux. There now migrating the init.d to upstart (the really fast boot up) but not all applications are using it yet and some have issues. Ex: on my server cupp starts before samba so all printer shares break.

Hopefully it gets better soon. Don't even get me started on unity GUI thats not even close to production ready. Ubuntu i think made a VISTA or ME with this release.

I don't mean to step on any toes, or get too far off topic, but Unity is far from Vista or ME. I've done a lot of testing at work and the reviews have been very favorable for Unity. I'm also downright surprised at how stable it is. Even moreso than XFCE (although I'm finding a few known bugs in 4.8 that might be effecting me). You may not think it's production ready, but it's far from Vista or ME.

That said, Ubuntu did change a few things with initiating services. Now some services use sudo service zoneminder restart, whereas some before used to use /etc/init.d/whatever, etc.

It's a bit confusing, but at the same time it's a little easier once you get used to it. In my opinion, at least.