ERP on a Flash.. in a Flash

My sister is wishing for a software to help her manage the raw materials inventory of her new bakery franchise. I think I'm going to end up as her Santa this year...

Lots of ERP heavyweights abound the opensource community.. but I want something lighter. Something that can fit in a USB flash drive and delivered in a pouch -- an ERP on a Flash!

And here's my magic combo: TinyERP 4.2.2 + Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex + 2GB Imation NanoDrive.

TinyERP is included in the Ubuntu repositories -- a promise of painless installation via a series of apt-gets. PendriveLinux.com has lots of guides on how to install Linux on a USB flash drive. I favored the Ubuntu 8.10 install using the built-in USB installer. This method provides a persistence feature allowing you to save the changes on subsequent boots.

Once Ubuntu is installed and booted up, we need to issue a sudo apt-get update command in order to synchronize the package index files from their sources. But before doing that, let's edit the list of apt sources via the command sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list. Uncomment the deb entry for the intrepid universe repository --- the TinyERP packages are contained here. Save the changes and issue the following commands to download the desired packages:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install tinyerp-server
sudo apt-get install tinyerp-client

At this point, the Postgres database server and client should be installed and two new accounts (postgres and terp) created. We still need to create the terp database and user...

sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql* restart
sudo su - postgres -c "createdb -q --encoding=UNICODE terp"
sudo su - postgres -c "createuser -q --createdb --adduser terp"

..and restart the TinyERP server.

sudo /etc/init.d/tinyerp-server restart

Press Alt-F2 and select Tiny ERP Client from the list of known applications. You can view the User Manual here .

TinyERP is re-branding itself and is now known as OpenERP.