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Gallery Appliance 1.1 Available
Submitted by h0bbel on Wed, 2007-04-18 22:06
A new and updated version of the Gallery Appliance has been made available. Thanks to the help of rPath, the new appliance includes Gallery 1.5.6 and Gallery 2.2.1.
Improvements include:
- Updated Gallery 1 and Gallery 2 versions
- More Gallery modules enabled, and Downloadable Plugins are also available.
- SCSI emulation instead of IDE emulation makes it possible to run on VMWare ESX server.
- rPath Appliance Platform (rAP) agent for remote appliance administration
- Increased number of build types. The Appliance is now downloadable for several virtual and non-virtual environments
Go Download the appliance and be sure to check the documentation for more details.
For more details, please read on!
The Gallery VMware Appliance is a GNU/Linux distribution based on rPath Linux. Basically, it is a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) appliance with both Gallery 1 and Gallery 2 pre-installed and pre-configured, along with all of the required utilities and most of the optional ones. They are both pre-loaded with some random pictures from various Gallery team members so that you can test things out without even having to find your own images.
The Gallery team would like to thank both Valentyn Khokhlov and Michael K. Johnson of rPath in assisting us rebuilding the Appliance for the new releases. The work done this time should make it easier for us to update it on our own the next time and the inclusion of the rAP agent makes it easier for all the appliance users to update their appliance later on.
than you so much !!!
i was waiting for this since last year !
I am very glad those rPath guys were able to figure out what the heck I did to create the last Gallery appliance, because I sure don't remember how I did it. Not only did they figure it out, they took the time to improve it too.
Thanks, you wonderful guys at rPath
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Support & Documentation || Donate to Gallery || My Website
OK, this is not quite yet an appliance.
1) 1.8GB free is not enough. If this is to be an appliance, all command line functions must have a web page implementation. How many people will use this appliance if in order to add disk space for data they have to:
fdisk sdb and create a partition
mkefs2 -options /dev/sdb1
mkdir /opt/g2data
mount /dev/sdb1 /opt/g2data
This needs to be GUIfied
2) the login.txt file thing needs to go away. An appliance should not require nano to create a file in /srv/www/gallery2
3) Why not just set the hostname statically to gallery2? I know what a VMware MAC address looks like; so I know what the IP address of the appliance is by looking at the MAC addresses in the DHCP table? Most people don't know that.
4) What's with all the complaining at boot time about /sys is already mounted?
5) An appliance should not require
chmod 777 /opt/g2data from the command line. The configurator should invoke this command with the root password.
I should have more later.
GaryOlson:
1) Expanding the available disk space, or even creating a second disk that holds g2data is a good idea. We might look at doing something like that for the next version.
2) We will not change Gallery 2 code to remove the login.txt authentication check for the appliance. It will always be based on the same codebase as the other Gallery releases. When did you encounter having to create a login.txt in the appliance btw?
3) Setting a static hostname could potentially interfere with other instances in the same network etc. We do not have control over how many appliances one might want to run, nor do we want to. Using bridged networking mode with dhcp, and no hostname, is the most failsafe way to do it.
4) Thats an rPath issue, it will be resolved in a later version. For now its just an annoying cosmetic error in the boot sequence.
5) No need to chmod g2data at all, the files there are owned by the Apache user anyway.
h0bbel - Gallery Team
If you found my help useful, please consider donating to Gallery
http://h0bbel.p0ggel.org
We tried to strike a balance between users who will use this as a demo (which I think is the intended use) and those that will use it for real. I guess the assumption is that if you are going to use it for real, you know what you are doing. Perhaps we could simply up the free space? I don't think it would increase the download *or* the size of the virtual appliance when extracted.
As h0bbel said, this is part of G2's security and won't be removed. The appliance comes with a pre-installed / configured G1 and G2, so you should only hit this if you wipe it out and start over.
I'm not quite sure what you hope to achieve with the static host name. If it *were* set to say, "gallery-appliance" then some how all the other computers would have to be aware of the hostname. Generally, this would probably mean running samba at the very least... and that only takes care of windows and users of linux with samba setup to do host lookup using windows. And why did you have to look up the MAC in your DHCP leases? The final screen of the appliance (when you are looking at the login: prompt) has the IP address as part of the 3 or 4 useful URLs for the appliance.
Dirty, eh? They know, we know, hope it gets fixed
When did it require this? Did you nuke the demo G1/G2 and create your own?
Looking forward to it, the better it is the happier everyone is. If you have skill / experience with rPath or VMWare appliances, perhaps you'd even consider helping out!
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Support & Documentation || Donate to Gallery || My Website
Looks quite intresting!
*checks it out :>
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Not that my G2 runs on the appliance, but it uses up 17G
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Support & Documentation || Donate to Gallery || My Website
No, 1.8GB is not enough. I expect to use the appliance as a server on the Internet. I have quite a few digital pictures. Besides, best practices do not really allow for placing your database in the same partition as the OS.
In looking over what I did yesterday, I did not treat this as just an appliance -- I did remove the original Gallery data to create my own data. My bad. Therefore the comments about editing login.txt was not required...and other shell commands.
I first installed Gallery on IIs/windows a couple of years ago before VMware; documented the whole process. Quite tedious but slightly entertaining. I don't know if I have time for exploring rPath.
I agree, if you want to use the appliance as a "live" hosting environment, 1.8GB won't go very far. We should look into creating a larger second partition inside the VM that expands to the max size as it gets filled with data. It's on the list of issues to investigate for the next release.
In the mean time, I would be very grateful if you (GaryOlson) could add your instructions on creating a new partition etc to the appliance documentation.
h0bbel - Gallery Team
If you found my help useful, please consider donating to Gallery
http://h0bbel.p0ggel.org
Problematic...
Step one would be to purchase VMware Workstation; which is sort of outside the definition of an appliance on VMplayer. This will need to be addressed with a different release of the appliance. I might have time in a month or so to look into this.
Purchase VMWare workstation? How does that come into it? Oh well.
h0bbel - Gallery Team
If you found my help useful, please consider donating to Gallery
http://h0bbel.p0ggel.org
Ok, that made no sense either. This is not the right place to discuss that anyway.
h0bbel - Gallery Team
If you found my help useful, please consider donating to Gallery
http://h0bbel.p0ggel.org
I, too, don't understand the complaints about the size of the disk. 1.8GB is more than enough for a demo. OTOH, I've created some rPath appliances before that were in a similar quandry. One that that I did uses a CGI script to provide several differently sized .vmdk files for download along with instructions for editing the aapliance's .vmx file. Then at boot time, a startup script looks for the second disk and, if found, mounts it in the appropriate place. Empty pre-formatted disks compress extremely well, so the space requirements were minimal.
As a quick fix, here is a source of premade SCSI & IDE drives, and instructions to edit your .vmx file.
I'll have to look into creating a Gallery module to make the internal changes to the appliance.
Adding that information to the codex would be great, if you could.
h0bbel - Gallery Team
If you found my help useful, please consider donating to Gallery
http://h0bbel.p0ggel.org
Thanks a lot, it is really a big step in the new version....
Regards,
Guido
Damn, I installed the previous version on my new server the other day ... mmm here we go again ;-)
Regards Eric
I'm a newbie with this software but I heard good stories about it. I'm gonna use the new version on my personal website.
Greets,
Mark
Well, good news for a new user like me
I hope I will be able to use it ..
thanks
Thanks a lot for this, am using gallery on my new project and sincerely its better than any other paying Solution, Open source really rocks!
Excellent article its realy helpful, keep up the good work!
Thank you
I totally agreed with you. Open source all the way..
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Mak