BitNami Stack for Open Atrium: make your team communicate better

We are happy to announce a new Stack to our catalog: BitNami Open Atrium.  Open Atrium is an open source platform designed specifically to make great teams communicate better. An intranet in a box with: a blog, a wiki, a calendar, a to do list, a shoutbox, and a dashboard to manage it all. It’s also completely customizable.

Open Atrium is built on top of  Drupal, which is also available in our catalog.

Open Atrium application

As with all BitNami Stacks, the BitNami Open Atrium Stack is available as a binary installer for native installs on Windows, Linux and OS X, as a virtual machine and as an Amazon cloud image (AMI). You can see an example of the group features in Open Atrium in the following video:

Open Atrium is a product of Phase 2 Technology, which also provides commercial support, consulting, and training.

Pretty Awesome

 Image by moonlightbulb, Creative 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 :)

New Gitorious Stack

We are happy to announce a new addition to our family, Gitorious. It is a great way of collaborating on distributed open source projects. Gitorious provides an open source infrastructure for hosting projects that use Git. It also supports projects with wikis, a web interface for merge requests and code reviews and activity timelines for projects and developers.

BitNami Gitorious Stack makes setting up Gitorious a simple process, so you can integrate your Git projects easily. 

Gitorious sample project

As usual, BitNami Gitorious Stack is now available in the form of ready-to-run installers, virtual machine images (VMs) and Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for the Amazon Cloud. 

If you use the installer, note that Gitorious requires you to specify a hostname to access it from other computers. It is advisable to use a hostname or domain instead of an IP address to avoid issues with different browsers. Note that the Virtual Machine is configured using an IP address by default but you can change it easily:

$ sudo /opt/bitnami/apps/gitorious/updateip --machine_hostname your_hostname

You can find more info in our Wiki.

Gitorious is developed by Gitorious AS, which also provides commercial prepackaged versions of Gitorious as well as managed servers and professional consulting services. Make sure to check them out if you need commercial support for Gitorious.

BitNami module for Redmine 2.0 already available for new Rubystack

Last week we released the new BitNami Redmine 2.0 Stack with several configuration improvements:

• On Linux and OS X, the default configuration now uses Passenger (a.k.a mod_rails) instead of Mongrel Cluster servers. This configuration improves the Redmine application performance for these platforms.
• On Windows, the BitNami Redmine Stack uses Thin servers instead of Mongrel to deploy the Redmine application. Different benchmark tests show that Thin performance is also better than Mongrel.

Now, we are happy to announce two new versions of BitNami RubyStack:

- Version 2.3.14-2: Which supports the new Redmine module version in addition to other  PHP  BitNami modules like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla!, SugarCRM, etc. These modules are installed on top of this RubyStack and they share the same Apache server and the MySQL database.

- Version 3.2.5-0: Which ships the latest version of Rails and Ruby 1.9.

Both RubyStack versions include RVM 1.13.6 for OS X and Linux. On Windows they ship the DevKit to install gems that require to be compiled for this system easily.

As usual, RubyStack and Redmine are now available in the form of ready-to-run installers, virtual machine images (VMs) and Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for the Amazon Cloud. 

BitNami is Coming to Windows Azure!

In connection with Microsoft’s release of new Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) capabilities to its cloud platform, we are very happy to announce that we are bringing your favorite BitNami apps to Windows Azure! In the very near future, we will be publishing two free images for Windows Azure, one focused on web development platforms and another with development environments.

The first image, BitNami DevPack,  provides an instant development environment for some of the most popular web development runtimes and servers, including PHP, Django, Ruby on Rails, Tomcat, MySQL, PostgreSQL and dozens of others. Everything you need to get started developing and hosting your own applications on Windows Azure is included in BitNami DevPack.

The other image, BitNami WebPack, includes ready to run versions of three of the most popular open source blog and CMS engines: WordPress, Drupal and Joomla!. It allows you to deploy full-featured websites in minutes which you can later customize with thousands of plugins and addons available for these platforms.

As with all BitNami Stacks, BitNami WebPack and DevPack for Azure are completely configured and ready-to-run, so you can have them up and running in minutes.

Sign up to be the among the first to know when these new images are available at: http://bitnami.org/azure. 

Apache Solr ready-to-run for Windows

We have just released the Windows version of the BitNami Apache Solr Stack. Solr is an open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. This Stack installs and configures Solr Server through Jetty for Windows systems.

Apache Solr is frequently used with Drupal for implementing a search framework. You can find a quick guide about how to connect Drupal with Apache Solr at http://blog.bitnami.org/2012/05/new-bitnami-apache-solr-stack.html

New OSClass Stack, build your own classifieds site in minutes

We are happy to announce a new member in the BitNami family: BitNami OSClass Stack. OSClass provides a platform for developing full-featured classifieds websites for real estate, jobs, or any other product or service. A wide variety of themes and plug-ins make it easy to customize and extend it to work with services such as Paypal, Google Analytics, Facebook, and YouTube.  

As the newest addition to the BitNami library of open source application packages, OSClass is now available in the form of ready-to-run installers, virtual machine images (VMs) and Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for the Amazon Cloud. 

OSClass sample site