What can I expect from the Zimbra team

[daimer77]

From next week, I will start a journey into installing the Open Source version of Zimbra.

As I know it is not supported and also not advised so far, I will at least give it a try, since Solaris is what we do

In general a lot of big cooporate companies actually don't like to put production critical apps on other OS's than Solaris. No religion here, but I am talking from my experience as consultant in the Health and banking business.

Before I start I should mention it is my intention to keep U updated here, and hope that other will benefit from my experience. I will do my best to produce useable documentation, and publish it here.

So now the question is: As Solaris is a no go here, can I ever expect just a little support through the forum from the Zimbra team (at least morally), or will there be no way I get any help here ?

Is there any Solaris experiences at all ? Even rumours about Solaris experiences would be nice to hear of

Anyway nice product (I tested on FC4 so far).

Best regards, Daniel Mersebak, Copenhagen Denmark (Just so U know, I am not proud of the danish newspapers recently )

[KevinH]

Many of us at Zimbra have more professional Solaris experience than Linux to be honest. It's just not a priority to port to this OS at the moment and we don't have any sparc hardware either.

In general most things will compile, but the packaging will be the tricky part.

[daimer77]

Ok, You say packaging will become tricky! In what way then ?

Do You have any resources or links, in order to get some hints and tips to do packaging ?

I guess the problems are likely to occur during packaging because there is a lot of hardcoded stuff around the code and resources or ?

The first steps will be to obtain the source via Your CVS repos I guess ? And the next step will be to get the different opensource apps such as LDAP and tomcat for the solaris platform right ?

Well in general there is nothing to loose, and if I don't suceed at least it could be the case, You could get some useful experience from my attempt

Thank You,

Best regards, Daniel Mersebak

[marcmac]

Packaging becomes tricky because it's yet another packaging format, set of commands, etc. Currently we support 3 - .rpm, for RH and SuSE, .deb, for debian, and .pkg, for Mac OS X. Solaris requires another format (also .pkg, but a different .pkg, which is going to break some stuff right there

It's not a format I'm unfamiliar with (in fact, I think it's probably the most flexible of those listed) but it's another thing to support, test, etc, etc.

[daimer77]

Well, I have no experience in packaging in pkg format. But if I can just get some hints from You from time to time I not blame anybody if the things turn out not to work at all

As long as I know there is people with interest in what I will be doing with Zimbra, and that they can give some advices along the way, I will not be complaining

A question: Is it really necessary to package up, in order to install ? I mean can I do some manual install by hand and slowly makes things work. I am thinkin of something like, first LDAP, then tomcat and so on. I thought that the purpose with packaging was only in order to do easy distribution afterwards.

Best regards, Daniel Mersebak

[marcmac]

You could do that - but then, you'd have to do it every time. If you get it packaged, then install, config, etc becomes much easier.

First, though, you've got to compile it.