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OpenAustralia DevLive is a prebuilt development appliance that allows you to download a ready-to-run OpenAustralia development server. No server setup, no dependencies, no worries – just download and start hacking.

It is built using SUSE Studio and openSUSE 11.1.

Downloads

The appliance is available as a VMWare appliance (that can be run using the free VirtualBox software or the no cost VMWare Player).

A big thank you to Community Builders for hosting the appliance download.

Settings

Some important settings you’ll need:

• User user auto logs in to a desktop. Just fire up Firefox to see the dev site
• Unix users root and user – password oa
• MySQL – database openaustralia, user openaustralia, password openaustralia

How-to

This was all made possible by SUSE Studio and the fantastic development team behind it. Here’s a high-level overview of how it was made and some hints on using SUSE Studio:

The appliance is based on the openSUSE 11.1 GNOME Desktop template, from there I added the following software:

• lamp_server pattern
• libmysqlclient-devel
• MozillaFirefox-branding-openSUSE (pulls in Firefox)
• perl-DBD-mysql
• perl-Error
• perl-HTML-Parser
• perl-XML-RSS-LibXML
• perl-XML-Twig

Most of these are dependencies listed in the OpenAustralia install instructions.

After the Software comes the Configuration tab of SUSE Studio:

Beyond the basics that need configuration in this screen, I exported a copy of the OpenAustralia database schema and uploaded it using the Server tab. I also found that the Apache server was not configured to start automatically so I added a line to the post-build Scripts tab:

chkconfig -s apache2 235

to have the server start at runlevels 2, 3 and 5. I did this as chkconfig creates symlinks and the overlay files feature of SUSE Studio doesn’t create these (more on that now).

The Overlay Files tab is where things start to get interesting, from here you can upload files that get overlaid on the filesystem of our appliance. This is how the OpenAustralia files get created in /srv/www/openaustralia, for example. For this appliance there are a bunch of custom files:

• /etc/hosts – points dev.openaustralia.org to the local machine so you can use Firefox to look at the dev site
• /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini – set short_open_tag = On
• Add in the TWFY and libs source code into /srv/www/openaustralia
• Add a custom config/general OpenAustralia configuration file
• Add the OpenAustralia Apache configuration and enable the rewrite module

That’s it, now all you need to do is visit the Build tab to build a VMWare image, Disk/USB image, Live CD or Xen virtual machine.

Git Repository

All of the files used to create OpenAustralia DevLive are hosted in a GitHub repository so you can now build your own if you’d like.

Future

To-do

• Add data to the DB v0.0.2
• Firefox default start page v0.0.3
• Add Open VM tools v0.0.3
• Test binary diffs to create delta images for testers
• Have the appliance download the latest code via a script that the user can run
• Better logo
• Get the parser working
• Get a dev copy of the Public Whip working

Change Log

0.0.5 – Make the twfy directory a Git repo that can git pull from updates from the Github repo

0.0.4 – Enable searching on the OpenAustralia dev site

0.0.3 – Added git, added Open VM Tools (removed Perl-Error due to a conflict). Firefox bookmarks and start page changed

0.0.2 – Added data to DB

0.0.1 – First alpha release. Basic web app running