Considering Moving away from Virtualmin - reasons

I have been a long time user and supporter of Virtualmin/Webmin. However there are now very, very serious issues with the lack of progress demonstrated to be able to provide the right environment to use modern versons of CMS namely Joomla and Wordpress.

I don't know why this is not flagged more often by Virtualmin customers. As a minimum more modern version of mysql is a must as is PHP or even Centos6. We are going to be losing customers if this cannot be provided in the very near future - and that for us is an extremely serious issue. If this was free software I could understand it but we are paying for this!

So, can I ask the team for a roadmap as to when these more modern versions are going to be available in the repos.

Please, no fudge answers! This is a serious issue!

Status: 
Active

Comments

Howdy -- Virtualmin doesn't actually provide most of the packages on your system, including PHP and MySQL. Those are included with your distro.

CentOS 5 is an older distro, so the packages on there would indeed be dated.

There are a few options available for how to obtain more recent packages --

If you were to upgrade to CentOS 6 (64 bit), you would be able to use the CentOS SCL repository, which is a method Virtualmin supports for running two PHP versions at the same time.

Your users could then choose between the default CentOS version of PHP (which is 5.3.3), and the PHP version available in that SCL repository (which uses a PHP version in the 5.4.x branch).

There are instructions for using multiple PHP versions here:

https://virtualmin.com/documentation/web/multiplephp

However, that doesn't provide an alternate MySQL version.

An alternative is that there's a new RHEL/CentOS version coming out soon, likely in the next few months. If you migrate over to it, you would have newer PHP and MySQL versions.

Another option is to use an alternate distribution, such as Ubuntu. Ubuntu has more frequent releases (every two years), and it's possible to upgrade them in-place. You don't need to upgrade them -- they're each supported for 5 years. But you can if you wish to.

The most recent Ubuntu version, 14.04, provides PHP 5.5.9 and MySQL 5.6.17. However, even the previous Ubuntu version, 12.04 which was released two years ago, still has PHP version 5.3.10 and MySQL version 5.5.37, which are more recent than those included in the newest CentOS version.

If you're interested in seeing what the process is like to upgrade from one Ubuntu version to the next, you can read our instructions for going from 12.04 to 14.04 here:

https://virtualmin.com/documentation/system/os/ubuntu-precise-to-trusty

Feel free to let us know if you have any questions or comments.