[opencms-dev] Tripping people up during installation

[Jeff Taylor]

Hi Guys,

New to OpenCMS - here are a few issues that are going to trip people up  
- and which have so far prevented me installing your product:

a)  You mislead all users of Microsoft's SQL driver by calling the 
Merant driver the Microsoft Driver.  For a long time now Microsoft has 
used it's own driver (bought from Merant I think), which has a different 
URI and a different classname....
      Please rename the "Microsoft" one that you have to Merant.       
Also include a real Microsoft one (which I think is free, and probably 
will get more use).

b) On doing some research, I edited the opencms.properties file.
     After editing the driverclassname/url, separately in either emacs 
or vi, I ALWAYS get this particularly unhelpful message:
   <12-May-2003 08:36:07 BST> <Error> <HTTP> <101017> 
<[ServletContext(id=10187574,name=opencms,context-path=/ope
     ncms)] Root cause of ServletException   java.lang.NullPointerException
       at com.opencms.boot.CmsSetup.getExtProperty(CmsSetup.java:163)
       at 
com.opencms.boot.CmsSetup.getDefaultContentEncoding(CmsSetup.java:1061)
       at 
jsp_servlet._ocsetup.__content_encoding._jspService(__content_encoding.java:559)
       at weblogic.servlet.jsp.JspBase.service(JspBase.java:27)
       at 
weblogic.servlet.internal.ServletStubImpl$ServletInvocationAction.run(ServletStubImpl.java:1058)

   I get this after entering DB info inthe setup screeen.  I do have the 
-Dfile.encoding thing on, because when I didn't I got stopped
   at some prior screen.

   Can someobdy please tell me what that means, how to fix it?  (And 
perhaps make the error message more helpful for others)

Thanks in advance.
Regards,
J

PS.  Running WL 7 on W2K on JDK1.4.1