CanvasLMS joins Bitnami!

We are happy to announce that CanvasLMS is now available on our app catalog!

CanvasLMS is an open-source Learning Management System (LMS) application that integrates multimedia course content in an easy environment.

It is built using Ruby on Rails as the web application framework and PostgreSQL as the database. Everything is included on the Bitnami Stack. 

CanvasLMS also offers the following features:

• Allows you to create courses with student assessments like quizzes or surveys.
• Provides a virtual space for your class where you can post the student grades and track the progress using a friendly interface.
• Its design adapts for mobile phones so you can connect everywhere.
• It has an user-customizable navigation.
• You can configure many automated tasks so you can reschedule jobs and avoid repetitive work

CanvasLMS is now ready to install in a few clicks with the Bitnami CanvasLMS Installers, Virtual Machine images (VMs), cloud images for Amazon EC2, Azure, vCloud and Digital Ocean

You can try CanvasLMS by launching a free cloud demo server. If you are interested, click on the following button to create a 1 hour free server:

Fat Free CRM added to Bitnami Library

We're happy to introduce Fat Free CRM as part of the Bitnami library!

Fat Free CRM is an open source Ruby on Rails-based customer relationship management platform. Out of the box it features group collaboration, campaign and lead management, contact lists and opportunity tracking. The project goal is to spur CRM innovation by providing a clean code base that can be easily extended by developers.

Fat Free CRM is now ready to install in a few clicks with the Bitnami Fat Free CRM installers (available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X), Virtual Machine images (VMs) and Amazon EC2, Google and Windows Azure cloud images.

If you want to check out Fat Free CRM, simply launch a free cloud demo server. Click the button below to get your own Fat Free CRM instance running for 1 hour, for free!

We also had the opportunity to interview Steve Kenworthy, Maintainer of the project, who was kind enough to answer some of our questions:

What is the goal of the Fat Free CRM application?

The goal of Fat Free CRM is to provide a light-weight customer relationship management platform. It provides a core set of features that can be easily extended through the Admin UI to fit an organization's specific requirements.

What are some of the features of Fat Free CRM?

Fat Free CRM allows users to initiate leads, promote them to contacts and accounts, log opportunities and track campaigns. It provides the ability to extend account, contact, opportunity and campaign data with custom fields more tailored to an organization's needs. There is also a basic task management system to help track actions and help teams collaborate. The software is translated into over 15 languages and has a flexible plugin architecture designed to enable developers to easily write add-ons.

Which projects or organizations are using Fat Free CRM currently?  What kind of projects do they use it for?

We have a wide range of organizations using the system: 

• Corporations working in areas such as real estate, cloud services, healthcare and telecommunications
• Charities, universities and student groups
• Developer and consulting firms customizing for their clients (the software is MIT licensed)

It's usage varies widely as it is tailored to suit an organization's specific requirements. On the whole, it's about contact management.

What do you expect will be the main benefits of having Bitnami packages available for Fat Free CRM?

The Bitnami installers will help those who are wanting to get Fat Free CRM up and running very quickly without needing to set it up themselves. For those wanting to see what it can do, it's a one-click option to try it out.

Developers will be able to get a consistent, standards-based full-stack running much more quickly and the ability to install on cloud hosting providers opens up a huge number of deployment scenarios.

Would you like your favorite app to be part of Bitnami? Be sure to suggest and vote for it in our monthly contest!

New BitNami contest winner: Diaspora

We are happy to announce the latest winner of the BitNami contest: Diaspora*!

Diaspora* is a free personal web server that implements a distributed social networking service.  Installations of the software form nodes which make up the distributed Diaspora* social network. Instead of everyone’s data being contained on huge central servers owned by a large organization, local servers (“pods”) can be set up anywhere in the world. You can create your local pod and connect with the Diaspora* community worldwide.

We are working now to release pre-configured, ready-to-run native installers for Linux and OS X, virtual machines, and cloud images for Windows Azure and AWS. This will make it very easy to try out Diaspora*. Stay tuned!

We want to thank the community members that took the time to vote in our contest and made Diaspora* the winner. You can also vote for other projects or nominate a new project that isn't yet on our list. Don't forget to ask others to vote and share your favorite project so that it has more chances to win!

Experimental 2.0.0 support in JRuby 1.7.4. BitNami JRuby Stack updated.

We are happy to announce a new release of BitNami JRubyStack which now includes JRuby 1.7.4.

We have also updated other major components of the Stack, including Tomcat 7 and Java 7, Rails 3, bundler and other useful gems. As with all BitNami Stacks, you can get the latest JRuby Stack for free as a native installer or virtual appliance. The cloud images for both the Windows Azure and the Amazon cloud will be available as well.

While the primary goal of 1.7 point releases is to fill out any missing compatibility issues with Ruby 1.9.3, JRuby 1.7.4 already includes experimental Ruby 2.0 support. JRuby 1.7 defaults to 1.9 mode, but it is both Ruby 1.8 & Ruby 1.9 compatible and both versions of Ruby are bundled in a single install. JRuby 1.7.4 also allows you to start testing Ruby 2.0.0. For more details about the new features, see the JRuby Release notes.

Here is how you can use the Ruby 2.0.0 mode in your BitNami JRuby Stack installation. You can also check our  quick start guide for getting started with BitNami JRuby Stack.

1. Open the BitNami JRubyStack console.

On Linux and Mac OS X open a terminal and go to the installation directory.
Then execute:

./jrubyconsole

On Windows use the entry in the Start Menu: BitNami JRubyStack —> Use BitNami JRubySTack

Once you are in the console execute:

jruby -v

The output you receive will include:

jruby 1.7.4 (1.9.3p392)

2. Ruby 2.0.0 mode just for this session

If you want to use Ruby 2.0.0 mode just for this session, but use the 1.9.3 mode as the default, just need to add the JRUBY_OPTS environment variable for this session.

On Linux and Mac OS X execute:

export JRUBY_OPTS=--2.0

On Windows:

set JRUBY_OPTS=--2.0

Now executing jruby -v will show:

jruby 1.7.4 (2.0.0) 

Notice that once you close the terminal this configuration will be lost.

3. Ruby 2.0.0 mode as default mode

If you want to set Ruby 2.0.0 mode as the default mode (so you don’t need to configure it every time) edit the environment settings for you BitNami JRubyStack by doing the following.

On Linux and Mac OS X edit the setenv.sh file that you can find in the scripts directory of your installation by adding the line:

export JRUBY_OPTS=--2.0

On Windows edit the setenv.bat file in the scripts directory of your installation by adding the line:

set JRUBY_OPTS=--2.0

Now if you open the BitNami JRuby Stack console (as explained above) and execute jruby -v you will see that you are working with the Ruby 2.0.0 mode.

GitLab 5.0 released in BitNami

We are happy to announce that GitLab v5.0 has just been released in BitNami. For those not familiar with this project, GitLab allows you to keep your code secure on your own server, manage repositories, users and access permissions, communicate through issues, line-comments and wiki pages and perform code review with merge requests.

The most important changes in this version are the following:

- GitLab-shell replaces Gitolite
- Instead of needing gitlab & git users accounts on the system we now only need git user to run GitLab
- The wiki is now stored in a git repository using the gollum library

You can download now the free and ready to run native installers for Linux, virtual machines and Windows Azure & Amazon EC2 images.

Discourse: modern forum platform now part of the BitNami library

We are happy to announce that Discourse is now part of the BitNami family! Discourse is a modern, sustainable, fully open-source Internet discussion platform built on Ruby on Rails.

Jeff Atwood, co-founder of the popular network StackOverflow, solved the Q&A problem by essentially suppressing free-form discussion. He started the Discourse project last year with one goal in mind, to support a broader discussion without falling victim to the trolling and spam that afflict many other forums and comment threads.

You can now launch a free cloud demo server with the BitNami Cloud Launchpad by clicking the launch button below.

You can also download free, ready to run native installers for Linux and OS X, virtual machines and Azure & Amazon EC2 images. Discourse was included in BitNami because they were a winner of the BitNami bi-weekly packaging contest. Head over there to vote for the next application to be packaged or to suggest your own.

Discourse forum

New BitNami Redmine 2.2.0 released!

We are happy to announce that you can now download a new BitNami Redmine stack for the just-released Redmine 2.2.0 version. In case you are not familiar with the Redmine project, it is a flexible, web-based project management application.

This version of Redmine adds support for the latest Rails release: Rails 3.2.9. We also upgraded PHP to the latest stable version: 5.4.9.

New features in this version:

• Private comments in issues.
• Ability to allow subtasks in subprojects or other projects (can be turned on/off with a configurable scope).
• Issue relations improvements:
• Precedes/Follows relations take care of non working days when rescheduling issues (non working days can be configured in the application settings).
• Precedes/Follows relations now also move following issues when rescheduling an issue earlier.
• A new relation "Copied from/to" is automatically added when copying issues.
• You can now filter issues against their relations.
• Relations can be displayed on the issue list.
• Issue list improvements:
• The order of the group column can now be set.
• An option lets you display the full issue descriptions on the issue list.
• REST API additions: wiki pages, roles, priorities, user Impersonation.

Download the free native installer or virtual machine or deploy the new Redmine 2.2.0 version to the Amazon cloud in one click from the BitNami Redmine page. Enjoy!

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 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.