Choosing a flavor of Linux?

[aperry]

I installed EE 1.5 about a year ago and was very impressed. In fact, it actually helped me sell my condo! At that time it was hosted through a service provider.

Now I'm interested in installing and hosting EE from my house. I'd like to build it within VMWare so that I can easily move it between machines without reinstalling all the tools and whatnot (I tend to rebuild my machines a lot).

My question is: Can anyone recommend a lightweight linux distro for EE? My goal is to minimize the overhead on the machine. VMWare already takes a lot of resources to do it's thing, so I'd like to try to minimize the OS overhead.

I've used Ubuntu, and I think it's a little heavy. But maybe the server version? Anyone have experience with installing EE on various Linux distributions?

Thanks in advance,
Aaron

[aperry]

Just in case anyone's interested, I have this up and running using Ubuntu (server version), running within Microsoft Virtual PC, running on a Vista PC. The "virtual pc" thing is so that I can easily port the entire EE setup to a different machine if necessary (without reinstalling everything). I prefer VMWare, but it doesn't run in Vista yet.

It works nicely. I'm not sure yet exactly how much overhead it takes from the system (which doubles as a Media Center PC, so it's always on).

A couple of things I learned through this:

* PHP Memory Limit has a big affect on how quickly the images can be resized. I had to increase mine from the default 8M because it wouldn't even handle files bigger than 3 megs. I'm running with 32M now.

* Larger microthumbs don't look very good on the index page! They lose their aspect ratio and look distorted. (I think I used 70 instead of the default 43 for the longest edge). I had to switch back to the default. Maybe they get squeezed into a certain sized slot?

* Teaching myself how paths work was frustrating (even though I did this once before a year ago). But the test tools helped.

* Ubuntu is a great platform for EE. The server version has a default "LAMP" install option (stands for Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) which preinstalls all of these. All of the other packages are easily available through apt-get.

* Webmin makes MySQL and Apache server management easy.

I guess that's about it. I'm sure you all know most (all?) of this already. But I just thought I'd provide my "new user" comments in case they help.

I guess it goes without saying, but I'm still really impressed with this application. I'm incredibly impressed with how stable and reliable it is (I'm in the software QA business). Nice job Pekka, and thanks for all of your hard work.

Aaron

[fightpants]

Have you ever tried Xen? it is similar to VMware, but it loads with grub. It uses less resources than VMware, and it does not have to continusly write threads of code to the hardware like VMware does. I am currnetly using it with Ubuntu.
I love it!

[aperry]

Have you ever tried Xen? it is similar to VMware, but it loads with grub. It uses less resources than VMware, and it does not have to continusly write threads of code to the hardware like VMware does. I am currnetly using it with Ubuntu.
I love it!

I haven't tried Xen, but I've heard of it and I'm tempted. In retrospect it may have been a better choice. Maybe a project for my next weekend project :)

Meanwhile, I'm really having a great time with EE.

Aaron

[Pekka]

* Larger microthumbs don't look very good on the index page! They lose their aspect ratio and look distorted. (I think I used 70 instead of the default 43 for the longest edge). I had to switch back to the default. Maybe they get squeezed into a certain sized slot?

There are thumb size limiter settings in basecode/SETUP_settings.php (under "thumb max size limiters", this is there reason for your problem. Change those to max you allow.

And thanks for your compliments! :) If you have any wishes, comments or advice please do not hesitate to bring them up!

I can also recommend Webmin, it is one of the most useful programs out there. I run EE on RHEL 4 and all Windows' (currently Vista Home Premium). For windows easiest way to get things running is WAMP server: http://www.wampserver.com/en/

[aperry]

Pekka,

Thanks for the note, and for the tip on thumbs. I probably should have spent some more time digging into EE before posting my feedback (so I could discover some of these settings myself) but I wanted to get my thoughts down before I forgot them.

Anyway, I've been running for 12 days or so and everything is great. Again, what a great application. I'm up to about 600 photos. Probably not a lot comparatively, but it's a good start.

I ended up porting my setup back to a physical server (no more virtualization) because I wasn't happy with some characteristics of Virtual PC, and so today I spent some time working out an automated backup solution.

My requirements were to backup periodically onto another physical machine. I ended up creating two crontab entries. One runs a mysqldump, the next automatically tars up my entire EE directory (which includes the mysqldump from the previous step). Then there's another service on the receiving machine which FTP's the tar file over. How are others doing it (on top of the database backup/restore features in the application)?

Anyway, I think my feature requests are echo'd in the wishlest section. User upload and ecards would be fantastic. I'm looking forward to whatever you come up with next!

An email tool would be cool. I'd love to send an update to a set of users to advertise new exhibitions and photos and try to get them back to the site. This sounds like a lot of work the more I think about it (with "opt out" functionality), but maybe there's an existing tool that could be integrated? Just an idea.

Aaron