Updating ZoneMinder is not an easy affair
Here are some notes after successful upgrade from ZoneMinder 1.25 (the most common included in distribution install via sudo apt-get install), to the latest one as of writing of this article (1.26) on Ubuntu 12.04- server. Note: not tested under any other distribution.
- Download the latest source code and untar on your server. This will save you some headaches later on.
- If you are installing from a relatively fresh/minimal distribution, start with adding PPA support to apt-get:
sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
Why this is not included in the distribution, I have no idea. How are we supposed to know that PPA support is included in this package?
- Proceed to add the PPA that includes the latest ZoneMinder distribution:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:iconnor/zoneminder
- Refresh database with
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
- Now, the trouble here is that ZoneMinder refused to upgrade. I have Webmin installed in the system, so just for kicks I went to system - software packages and did a full re-sync under Upgrade Mode = Normal Upgrade. That finally installed the latest version of ZoneMinder. Don’t quite think you are done…
- If you go to ZoneMinder console, you will note that the server is stopped. Even if you try to start, it will fail. The error message in the log indicates:
2014-03-15 14:29:36.345510 zmpkg 766 FAT Version mismatch, system is version 1.26.5, database is 1.25.0, please run zmupdate.pl to update. zmpkg.pl
- Go to the source code directory to whatever location you untarred, and go to scripts directory. From there perform a
sudo zmupdate.pl
That should do the trick…well, not yet. Now all the cameras are in black and white under the montage(I assume also under recording). You will need to go under each camera setting on the console, and under the source tab, change the target colorspace from 8 bit greyscale to whatever color you need (16 or 32). I hope you don’t have a lot of cameras.
Note:this error came up, no idea if it has affected functionality, but it does not give me any comfort:
2014-03-15 14:31:10.420843 web_php 32660 FAT SQL-ERR 'Unknown column 'ZM_LOG_CHECK_PERIOD' in 'where clause'', statement was 'select Level, count(Level) as LevelCount from Logs where Level < 0 and TimeKey > unix_timestamp(now() - interval ZM_LOG_CHECK_PERIOD second) group by Level order by Level asc /usr/share/zoneminder/includes/database.php
78