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#1 Fri, 07/03/2009 - 14:09
ctucker50

SLES 11

What is the chance that SLES 11 can be added to the supported operating systems?

Fri, 07/03/2009 - 17:13
Joe
Joe's picture

Pretty low, unfortunately. We've had very low demand for SUSE support. We added it a couple of years ago, and ended up with one paying customer for the SUSE version. We can't justify that kind of development expense for one customer. ;-)

That said, I'm doing a pretty big overhaul of the install script at the moment, and we'll probably put it into git, along with everything else Open Source in the project, and it might be feasible for someone else to step up and take on the responsibility of the install script and a SLES repository.

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Fri, 07/03/2009 - 17:25 (Reply to #2)
ctucker50

I would be interested in tweaking the install script to work with SLES 11 if necessary. Of course, the whole of virtualmin/usermin might be a pretty big task but I would like to install and test anyway.

Fri, 07/03/2009 - 17:36 (Reply to #3)
Joe
Joe's picture

So, it's probably not immediately obvious from what I said previously...but the hard part is not found in the install script itself. The install script is dumb and simple (and already kinda knows about SUSE, as I never removed the detection and repo setup code, but it'll have to be changed, as there's a different package manager now than when it was first built). The hard part is maintaining the software repository and the virtualmin-base package; as well as testing and tweaking (which is pretty time-consuming, since we have to run the install each time a change is made to see what else is broken!). This is what takes a couple of weeks of solid effort, as well as a lot of ongoing maintenance in order to keep it up to date. And this is the part we can't afford to devote resources to, because it's two weeks of time I just can't spare.

In short: Modifying the install script won't make installation work on SLES. Not even close. There also has to be a software repository that provides a virtualmin-base package (where the hard work happens), and possibly a number of dependencies. And, unless they've fixed the bugs in their yum repository support, there will have to be a repo for all of the Virtualmin modules that works with whatever the current package manager is. It was all in flux when I was building SUSE support, so I don't know what the package management situation currently looks like on SLES.

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Fri, 07/03/2009 - 17:51 (Reply to #4)
ctucker50

Ouch ... let me know when you setup git and maybe you can copy the current SLES 10 stuff into an SLES 11 testing repository. I have a virtual machine of SLES 11 that I can use to test and delete a million times. If you had it close to working on SLES 10 then 11 probably isn't too far behind. I would like to take a stab at it but if it looks like a complete disaster then I will have to back off.

Fri, 07/03/2009 - 18:04 (Reply to #5)
Joe
Joe's picture

Yes, it's obviously easier in a one-off install to just configure everything manually. Virtualmin does work on SUSE/SLES. It just isn't anywhere near easy to install (actually that's not true; Virtualmin itself is super easy to install; it's all of the other software that's hard...setting up Apache, Postfix, Dovecot, saslauthd, MySQL, BIND, etc. for virtual hosting can be a daunting process).

Going that extra mile of automating everything is only more efficient if it's going to happen more than once. ;-)

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Fri, 07/03/2009 - 18:11 (Reply to #6)
ctucker50

I don't have a problem doing a manual install and configure of all the needed software so long as it will work through the Virtualmin web screens afterwards. So it may still be worth my time to do a manual installation of Virtualmin? Hmm ... I think I will give that a shot and see what happens.

Fri, 07/03/2009 - 18:21 (Reply to #7)
Joe
Joe's picture

Oh, of course. If you configure everything correctly Virtualmin works fine on any Linux/UNIX system that Webmin supports (and that list is vast). We have some rudimentary manual installation docs in the Documentation section of the site. Still in progress, and not nearly complete (it's hard to write docs that covers every possible OS and every possible configuration; actually, it's probably impossible, but we're trying anyway).

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