Can Collaboration Suite run on Ubuntu Desktop 8.04?

[Sami]

I am planning an Ubuntu/Zimbra Collaboration Suite installation and for personal reasons I do not like Ubuntu Server in the slightest. I am however committed to Ubuntu Desktop and do not especially wish to use an alternative distro.

I believe I have read some time in the past that Ubuntu Desktop and Server are essentially the same product; simply that they are packaged differently. From what I have found, Ubuntu Server does not recognise hardware devices so readily and is pretty unpleasant to find your way around unless you have considerable Linux experience.

For the purposes of testing and getting to know Zimbra, I have obtained a laptop with Ubuntu Desktop 8.04 pre-installed. It works supremely well, and I would be loath to change it to Server edition. I would not want to work without the GUI interface.

Can someone tell me therefore, if I may go ahead with Ubuntu Desktop, even if perhaps there might be some issues I need to resolve? Many thanks.

[Sami]

Just for the benefit of any others who'd like to know, yes it does work. I went ahead with the installation and no problems at all so far.

[Dirk]

As you have found, yes it should work fine, providing that none of the extra apps and services installed by the desktop distribution are locking the ports used by zimbra. To put it another way, a Ubuntu desktop installation that does not have sql and postfix installed should be fine.

The reason most use server is that the additional load created by the GUI and extra services can be better used powering Zimbra itself, but if you are more confortable with the GUI and for testing rather than production, I see no issue here.

Come one come all, as they say

[Sami]

Many thanks for this reassuring post Dirk. For the benefit of any others who might want to use Ubuntu 8.04 Desktop, since my initial post I have had to do the following to get Zimbra to install:

sudo apt-get install libidn11 curl fetchmail libgmp3c2 libpcre3 libxml2 perl libexpat1

This information came from Installing Zimbra on Ubuntu | SubVS.co.uk

There was also a further package that the Zimbra install script said was missing:

sudo apt-get install libstdc++5

With regard to anything pre-installed with Ubuntu that might conflict with Zimbra, I can say for certain that mySQL was not running. I do not think Postfix was running but I will re-check that when I get back to perform a full and fresh installation.