Forum OpenACS Q&A: Best Configuration in Debian for Openacs Development

Hello All,

I'm recycling a Dell C810 to use a laptop development machine for OpenACS. In the past I have always used RedHat as my operating system of choice, but have been noticing lately that many of you use Debian.

I downloaded and burned the CD images for the install but noticed Debian requires one to specify almost every package needed for the installation, whereas RedHat just provided 3 or 4 standard installation types with modifications needed for specialized packages.

I guess what I'm asking for is a complete list of what I should be insuring I select for the intial Debian install?

If anyone has a list, it would go a great way to helping me decide whether Debian or Redhat for my future needs. I don't need to mention the recent changed with Redhat in regards to Fedora and mess that's creating for many Redhat users, so I guess it's time for me to try something else.

Any help you can provide will be greatly appreciated...

It's been a while since I last installed a new Debian machine, but as I recall, no, you shouldn't need to tediously pick and choose from all those zillions of packages by hand. Worst case, you should be able to pick some sort of "minimum necessary" package group during the initial install, and then add whatever other packages you want later with apt-get, after the initial install. I believe the Debian installer also include some sort of binning of packages into big functional groups in the Red Hat style. But with apt-get that's not really necessary.

If you already have one Debian machine with what you want installed, you should be able to look at its list of installed packages and just feed that to apt-get on the new machine if you like.

Of course, FAI is probably the "right" way to install machines, but I haven't looked into that yet.

Debian installs a base system with the minimum it needs to run, and then gives you the opportunity to pick sets of packages in tasksel, much like Red Hat (but Red Hat's set sizes are much larger).

You probably want to install Woody with the "bf24" option at the initial prompt. That will give you a 2.4.18 kernel.

For OpenACS you will want some new versions of PostgreSQL and Tcl. For PostgreSQL you want Oliver Elphick's PG packages (he's the mainainer). Add this to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://people.debian.org/~elphick/debian stable main contrib non-free

For Tcl8.4, you want backports.org's packages. Add this to your sources.list:

deb http://www.backports.org/debian stable tcl8.4

backports.org is a valuable resource. Look through http://www.backports.org/debian/dists/stable/ and just append whatever packages you'd like to the line above, after tcl8.4.

Besides tcl8.4 and PostgreSQL, you need AOLserver too. Francesce Lovergine is Debian's AOLserver 3.x maintainer. He (and several others including I in parallel efforts apparently) have been working on AOLserver 4 packages. Hopefully these will converge.

He has made some AOLserver 4 packages available for unstable on his repository: http://people.debian.org/~frankie/debian/sid/experimental/aolserver/

IIRC David Welton made packages of modules. I don't know where they are. I don't think either of these have woody backports yet. I also made AOLserver 4 packages, but I have to find where in my backups they are (hard drive failure in december).

Francesco, David, how about we join forces on these Debian packages? We'll probably get better outcome. I have a woody machine we can use to build backports (it uses tcl8.4 from backports.org)

Besides these, you'll need tDOM and a fow of the AOLserver 4 modules, which you'll likely have o compile by hand for now. You'll also need ssh and some decent editor besides nano-tiny, the default in Debian's install. vim or emacs21 or your choice.

Make sure you edit /etc/inetd.conf and comment any services you don't need. You can't uninstall portmap, but you can not start it at boot. See the update-rc.d man page.

Debian is an excellent distribution, specially for servers. For desktops you pretty much have to go with unstable (which really is pretty stable).

-Roberto

Btw, I had no major complaints about my Debian Stable 3.0 desktop machine. Even Mozilla 1.0.x was bearable, although 1.4 to 1.6 are vastly superior. With the addition of some backported packages, I don't think I'd have had any complaints about Stable at all.

Well I went ahead and answered my own question--I installed the 7.3.4 debs from Elphick's attic directory and they seem to work fine.