Things on my mind. George Drapeau's Weblog

I just published a short how-to video showing how you can easily install Acquia Drupal on OpenSolaris.


Sun's ISV Engineering group has been working with Drupal for a couple of years now; I also use Acquia Drupal to develop and maintain this web site, which also hosts my personal blog.  The Drupal community is amazingly vibrant and growing by leaps and bounds, and Acquia has done a nice job of commercializing the Drupal open source content management software package.  Acquia Drupal is still free, but it has some nice additions that any Drupal user or developer would want.

Anyway, check out the video; it's about 8 minutes long and walks you through the steps to find the catalog of third party applications, then get Acquia Drupal and configure it on your OpenSolaris system.  It's easy, and it just works.

Oh and by the way: props to our Sun Learning Exchange web site and staff for making it so darned easy to publish content.  Nice job, folks!

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Rack is a webserver interface for the Ruby open source programming environment.  Amanda Waite took the trouble of making this package available via the OpenSolaris packaging mechanism; ultimately, ruby-rack will be in the OpenSolaris "contrib" repository, but not until it gets a little testing and review, and some votes from the community, this functionality is now in the OpenSolaris "pending" repository.  I admit to great naivete about Ruby, so I'll refer you to this excellent explanation of what Rack does for Ruby developers.  (my summary of what I got from the explanation: Rack is a web framework for Ruby developers; in other words, if you like writing Ruby code and you want to write code to create a web-based application, Rack is a nice extension to Ruby to make doing this easy).

Anyway, been doing some testing of the package that Amanda submitted.  Here's what I did and what I observed:

First, I made sure I had access to the OpenSolaris Source Juicer "pending" repository.  As I've noted before, two steps:

1. type "pfexec pkg set-publisher -O http://jucr.opensolaris.org/pending jucr-pending"
2. type "pfexec pkg refresh"

After that, the next time you launch the Package Manager application, look on the right side of the application and you can choose "jucr-pending" from the pop-up menu.  Do that, and after a moment you'll see a list of all the packages in the "pending" repository.  You will find the package "ruby-rack" there.  Note that case matters; the package name is all lowercase.

So I did this and downloaded the package.  The package notes that it depends on the Ruby package.  The Package Manager pulled it in just fine.  How do I know?  Before installation, I could not type "ruby" and get anything back.  Afterward, it worked.

Next step:

$ cd /usr/ruby/1.8/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rack-1.0.1/example
$ rackup lobster.ru


This starts a web server on port 9292 with a little "lobster" program.  I launch the web browser and go to "http://localhost:9292" and I saw a simple web app that shows a crude "picture" of a lobster, and two things I can do: flip the lobster from right to left and back again, and show a crash dump of the Ruby Rack program.  I tried both of those things; they worked just fine.

After this, I killed the "rackup" program then tried it again with the other ".ru" file in that same directory, "protectedlobster.ru".  That gives an added feature of authenticating into the web app (password is "secret"; as far as I can tell, use any username you wish).  That worked, too: if I didn't provide the right password, nothing happened.  If I provided the right password, it worked fine.

So that all worked just fine.  The next set of tests was more in-depth, running a partial test suite.  For this set of steps, I had to install both the "SUNWgcc" and "SUNWgmake" packages, again with the Package Manager.  I did these steps:

1. su - (i.e., pretend you're root; without doing this, step 3 below complained that it couldn't write to /var/ruby/1.8/gem_home/bin)
   
2. Add /var/ruby/1.8/gem_home/bin to your $PATH
3. type CXX=/usr/sfw/bin/g++ gem install memcache-client ruby-openid camping mongrel thin test-spec --no-ri --no-rdoc
4. type "gem install rake"
   
5. type "rake test".

The output showed it compiling some stuff, then it said "Started" followed by a bunch of periods showing status, then "Finish in 3.960495 seconds."  Finally, a results line said "267 tests, 928 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors".

That sounds like good news to me!

So folks: the Ruby Rack web framework is available via OpenSolaris.  Check it out and see if it works for you, Ruby developers.  Let us know how it goes, will ya?

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SilverStripe is an open source content management system (CMS); we in Sun's ISV Engineering department have been working on getting this and other important open source applications into the OpenSolaris "contrib" repository, a place meant for third party applications that anybody can contribute.  I've been testing the SilverStripe package that Jenny Chen contributed; here are my notes.

Mostly, SilverStripe installs just fine; however, it has the same little hiccup as Joomla! did when I tested its installer.  (I documented that problem and workaround here)  No big deal, though: it's easy to apply the same quick workaround for MySQL before you get on your way.

Once done, I launched my web browser on my OpenSolaris box and went here: "http://localhost/silverstripe".  That brings me to the web-based SilverStripe installer.  It all looks good, but one thing to note at the bottom of the page (in the "Webserver Configuration" section) is that SilverStripe can't tell what web server OpenSolaris is running.  With the Web Stack, we're running the Apache web server.

One other note from the SilverStripe installer: it advises me to set the "allow_call_time_pass_reference" parameter in /etc/php/5.2/php.ini to "On", which I did just to avoid getting warnings shown to me during the installation process.

Anyway, did that, then pressed the "Install SilverStripe" button to get the installation on its way.  The installation took two minutes fifteen seconds (really; I timed it) under a fairly heavily-loaded computer.

It worked fine; I was able to add a couple of pages to my site, add a user and give that user privileges, and see it in action.

So now, if you use SilverStripe you can get to it in OpenSolaris via the Package Manager.  If you don't know how to install packages from the OpenSolaris "pending" repository (a staging area we use to test packages before they're promoted to the "contrib" repo I mentioned above)., then the main thing you need to learn is how to add repositories to your Package Manager application.  Do these two steps from a shell on your OpenSolaris installation:

1. type "pfexec pkg set-publisher -O http://jucr.opensolaris.org/pending jucr-pending"
2. type "pfexec pkg refresh"

After that, the next time you launch the Package Manager application, look on the right side of the application and you can choose "jucr-pending" from the pop-up menu.  Do that, and after a moment you'll see a list of all the packages in the "pending" repository.  You will find the package "silverstripe" there.  Note that case matters; the package name is all lowercase.

Check it out and let us know what you think.  Did SilverStripe install and work fine for you in OpenSolaris?  Give us some feedback.

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Nagios is an open source system monitoring software package; we thought it important to get the Nagios community supported on OpenSolaris so Sun's ISV Engineering department spent some time on the task.  You can check out our results by going to the OpenSolaris "pending" repository and installing these packages:

1. nagios
2. nagios-plugins
3. nrpe

If you want to see what I did to test these packages after installation, look at this review page and you'll see my comments from October 17.

If you don't know how to install packages from the OpenSolaris "pending" repository, then the main thing you need to learn is how to add repositories to your Package Manager application.  Do these two steps from a shell on your OpenSolaris installation:

1. type "pfexec pkg set-authority -O http://jucr.opensolaris.org/pending jucr-pending"
2. type "pfexec pkg refresh"

After that, the next time you launch the Package Manager application, look on the right side of the application and you can choose "jucr-pending" from the pop-up menu.  Do that, and after a moment you'll see a list of all the packages in the "pending" repository.  Nagios, nagios-plugins, and nrpe will be there.

Check 'em out, and leave comments to let us know what you think.  If they look fine, we'll promote them to the main third-party applications repository, the "contrib" repo.

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