Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Pretty Awesome

 Image by moonlightbulbCreative Commons Attribution 2.0
We literally get hundreds of thousands of users every month to our site, looking for installers and virtual machines for their favorite open source projects. We put a lot of time and effort into the stacks and making sure they work out of the box in most scenarios. In most instances, when we hear from users, it is because they run into issues trying to install an application, found a bug in the installation process or a mistake in the documentation. From time to time we also get emails like the below from Dave, which make us very happy and gives us the energy to continue to work on the stacks (posted below with permission) 

Subject: Pretty Awesome

An hour or so ago I had never even heard of BitNami.  I'm a retired EE now doing hardware/software development as a hobby.  I had always had access to bug trackers at work but had nothing at home.  For a couple of years now I've used a simple text file that contained random notes about bugs, enhancements I wanted to add, etc.  As this was becoming a bit unwieldy, I decided to see what was available as a simple bug tracker.  I first learned about Redmine but that seemed like overkill for what I needed.  Reading reviews about it I soon learned about Trac, which sounded much more like what I needed.  I jumped into the documentation and was immediately dismayed at all of the individual pieces that would need to be tracked down and installed.  Fortunately, there was a note toward the end of the installation section that mentioned an integrated installer that would install everything I needed.  I followed the link to your site and downloaded the Trac package.  Skipping from the installation section to the administration section of the documentation I start to look at all I would have to do to get a simple project up and going.  Finally, I just said "to heck with it" (or something to that effect) and installed the BitNami package.  I started getting excited when the installation started asking me things like user configuration, whether I wanted to create an initial project and so forth.  Minutes later Trac was up and running and I was using it to create, modify and view tickets on the sample project I had created.  Just what I needed!  I can focus on USING the package rather than on how to install and configure it.  You have saved me a bundle of time so I decided to spend a fraction of it writing this email to say THANKS!

Regards,
Dave Harper

We love to hear from our users, so if BitNami has been helpful to you please drop us a line :)