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Bitnami: Easier Open Source Installation for Free

By John Conroy
Nov 23. 2007

BitNami Open Source CMS Stacks

Bitnami.org has officially been launched, offering free installation stacks for a host of open source packages designed to make the deployment of such packages as Drupal and Joomla! infinitely easier for all.

Numerous downloadable, ready-to-run packages are available from Bitnami; each of which automate the installation and configuration process for techies and non-techies alike.

Stacks currently on offer include:

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…and Moodle in the pipeline.

Phew! As someone currently grappling with the horrible intricacies of getting Movable Type 4 up and running on a remote server, I have nothing but encouragement for any organization out there who can help with the deployment process.

Of course, not all OSS products are as clunky and temperamental as MT4 in terms of installation, and I rather doubt whether any have such unhelpful and conflicting installation instructions, but nonetheless. We love top OSS products like MT4 Community. But getting them up and running can be a serious pain.

Any chance of a MT4 stack, guys? Preferably by, say 8pm tonight? Put on a pot of coffee…

Installation is as straightforward as you might hope: a wizard runs through the whole process, doing what wizards do: i.e. asking you here and there for information you wish you had written down when you had the chance.

For curiosity’s sake I tried running through the Drupal wizard, and had a bit of a problem when I was told that Port Such&such was already occupied. In retrospect, though, I think this was probably due to the fact that I had just installed MySQL onto my machine (for no good reason at all), and that this had probably jiggered things up.

But it does of course show up the Achilles heel, if you like, of such stack-induced installation.

Different server technologies and different hosts have subtly different configurations. Should even the slightest parameter be awry, or such a module be missing, then the whole darn thing just stalls. One’s tinkerability is lost.

But then again you’ve lost nothing even if your stack fails you. And there’s a well-populated forum at Bitnami where techies like administrator Antonio will you help you with your questions. If everything runs smoothly, then the installation is done and dusted in five minutes, and you’re straight down to business. Surely that’s worth a 5 minute download, right?

We spoke with Bitnami at length about their products and their business model some time ago. If you are interested in Bitnami’s stacks, go here and grab one for yourself.

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Comments

Hadn't heard of these people. Interesting.

the horrible intricacies of getting Movable Type 4 up and running

I keep seeing various forms of this comment, though almost never with any sort of actual detail. Care to elaborate? (Ideally in a separate post, I suppose, so as not to derail here.) It takes me no more than 5-10 min to get a base MT install going, so this is always a bit of a mystery to me.

We love top OSS products like MT4 Community. [...] Any chance of a MT4 stack, guys? Preferably by, say 8pm tonight?

There's next to no chance of this happening, at least not for a bit. Remember that MT4 (and especially the Community Solution) is not OSS. The open source version of MT (generally referred to as MTOS for differentiation) is planned for availability in December as of the last information I've seen. At the time of that initial release, they should both be essentially equivalent, but from any point forward, it's a safe assumption the two will diverge at various points.

Posted by: Su on November 27, 2007 1:33 PM

"Remember that MT4 (and especially the Community Solution) is not OSS." Thanks for the clarification...and how I wish it were.

To be fair to 6A, the real problem for me was probably more with my hosting provider - who were (are) not so great.

I never got the problem sorted out - just gave up in the end and went down a different road. Is there something about Perl/CGI that's just inherently a pain in the rear? It always seems to be troublesome.

I'm not best qualified to give advice like this, but I would say that anyone who wants to use MT in a hosted environment might be best served going with a hosting provider who has demonstrated prior success running the platform.

Posted by: john conroy on December 1, 2007 5:03 PM

I don't think there's anything inherently problematic about Perl/CGI, (caveat: I'm not a server person.) but there are definitely various things one host or another has done to make things interesting (in the Chinese curse way). There's on-going work from the community to try and document some of that stuff here: http://wiki.movabletype.org/MT_Hosting_Quirks

Posted by: Su on December 2, 2007 7:14 AM

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