Inspired by the evangelism from Joyent (and more… and here’s an interview about zfs, one of the coolest bits, although the bit I really care about is DTrace), I’ve been taking a look at OpenSolaris. I’ve finally found a distribution that’s familiar enough to work well for me - Nexenta OS, aka GNU/Solaris. Thanks to Tim Bray for the pointer. (I see he’s written more on Nexenta… personally I can say that I’d notice something was different as soon as I tried ‘ps auxf’ or ‘lsof’, but it’s VERY nice to have apt-get!)

So here’s a quick HOWTO for installing PeopleAggregator on Nexenta.

First, set up your Nexenta install and make sure the hostname is something resolvable in DNS. I use pa.nexenta here because I have it running VMWare, but this meant I had to enter a static IP for pa.nexenta both in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts on the host machine and in /etc/hosts on the VM. If you have this running on a server which is properly set up, you won’t need to do this.

Now, install some software:

apt-get -y install libapache2-mod-php5 imagemagick php5-gd php5-mysql php-pear subversion php5-xsl php-db php5-xmlrpc python2.4 python-setuptools python-turbogears python-beautifulsoup python-mysqldb mysql-server

And check out our auto-PA-installer script:

svn co http://public.svn.broadbandmechanics.com/vm-root .

Now run it to check out the code and set up Apache, logrotate etc:

bin/pa-adm -c -h pa.nexenta

Now browse to http://pa.nexenta/ and fill out the form, then click ‘set up peopleaggregator’. And finally move the local_config file as directed:

mv /var/www/pa.nexenta/htdocs/pa/web/config/local_config.php /var/www/pa.nexenta/htdocs/pa/

Click on the ‘click here’ link, and you’re going!

The default homepage is showing me an error about timezone setting. I’ve already run tzselect and can see ‘TZ=NZ’ in /etc/TIMEZONE, but it doesn’t look like that info ever makes it to root or www-data. There’s probably a better way to fix this, but I did it by editing /etc/init.d/apache2 and adding ‘TZ=NZ’ to the environment variable up the top. Seems to work fine.

This HOWTO for installing MogileFS on Debian Sarge is almost right for Etch as well, but it’s a little easier now. You can get all the dependencies like this:

apt-get install subversion liblinux-aio-perl libbsd-resource-perl libcompress-zlib-perl libnet-netmask-perl libio-stringy-perl libwww-perl libdanga-socket-perl libdbi-perl