System setup - Part II

This post is a follow-up to System setup - Part I.

I installed Ubuntu 8.10 in VMWare. By the way, I am not much of a linux user. I mostly work on Windows and mac. First and foremost, I mounted VMWare Tools driver image. Double clicking the vmware tools rpm package didn't help. Package manager returned with an error. So, I tried to compile the drivers. I'll spare you from the details but, that also didn't work for me.

Then, it suddenly struck me, why don't I install good old Windows XP as my development server OS? I can perform all the required tasks in XP then why not? So, I installed Windows XP in VMWare.

Now was the hard part. I have never setup a development server with this many roles. I wanted to make it all-in-one ALM server (at least good enough for small projects). I needed to install Java Application Server, Database, Project Management System, Bug Tracker, SCM, a Wiki for development notes and a mail server.

For Java Application Server, jBoss should have been my first choice. But, somehow I was tempted to try Glassfish and Geronimo to find out which one is better. Because, at work; we use jBoss and I was impressed by its stability and ease-of-use but, wanted to try others anyway. So, I tried them one-by-one hoping for a perfect solution.

First was the Geronimo's turn. I successfully installed it. But, when it came to deploy an application WAR, it asked for deploy plan and deployment failed. I searched for the solution. But, couldn't find any way to bypass the whole deployment plan thing. So, I moved on.

I downloaded Glassfish jar and I don't know why but, I was not able to successfully install it and run it. I tried exact installation procedure from Glassfish site twice but, couldn't got around it. I simply don't have a clue why it failed.

jBoss AS was nice except some things didn't work as I have imagined. I am using jBoss AS on mac at my work. And now I know it was mac and not jBoss which gave me ease-of-operation. But, I had no other better choice. So, I settled with jBoss.

My database choice was obvious. I installed MySQL 5.1 Community Edition.

For project management systems, I did hefty amount of research for that. I got mainstream project management tools like Collabtive, e-Groupware and multi-purpose tools with basic project management functionality like trac, Redmine etc. What I needed was an all-in-one solution or a group of application which can be configured to run together in co-operation.

First, trac seemed to be the best solution for my needs. It is basically a python based application. So, I had to install python and mysql plugins for python. I downloaded and tried to installed it on my server vm. But, again I encountered a big fat failure. I could not manage to run the server. Then I moved on to Redmine which required RoR (Ruby on Rails) to run.

Manual installation and configuration of Rails in windows is kind of problematic. This time I was prepared for a failure and I failed. After a little bit of searching, I found RubyStack from BitNami. They had many configured-out-of-the-box packages. To my surprise, I didn't even heard of it. They are providing a preconfigured RubyStack as well as Redmine out of the box. I don't want to run multiple instances of web servers so, I am going to go for Redmine Stack which contains Redmine and Subversion. I am downloading it right now and will post about it in next post.