[Obm] New recruit testing 2.4-rc2 on Ubuntu 10.04.3 (64-bit)

[Ian McMichael]

Bonjour (sorry but that is as far as my written French goes without error!),

I am very impressed at having found the OBM project. I see it as an open 
source alternative to Microsoft Small Business server, which I have 
seeking for many years. Previously I have had a go a rolling my own 
solutions using OpenLDAP, Dovecot, Postfix and SAMBA.

I have been studying the wiki and testing the new 2.4 release on Ubuntu 
LTS Server (10.04.3 64-bit) with a fresh installation in a virtual 
machine. I am using the Debian repository at http://deb.obm.org/daily as 
my source. Ideally I would like to use MySQL as the database back-end 
but understand the limitations of this with Minig at the moment.

The main issues I have found so far are that the 2.4 .deb files require 
old packages only found in the Ubuntu Hardy (8.04.x) LTS release. To 
work-around this I have added the following (in addition to the OBM 
daily repository) to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ hardy main
deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ hardy-updates main
deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ hardy-security main

Then, to prevent any of these old packages from taking preference, I 
created /etc/apt/preferences containing the following:

Packages: *
Pin: release n=hardy
Pin-Priority: 10

This then allows the basic installation to succeed by typing:

apt-get install obm mysql-server php5-mysql

OBM Satellite starts and immediately dies as it can't write its PID to 
the .run file. To fix this, I needed to type (as root or prefixed by sudo):

mkdir /var/run/obm
service obm-satellite start

After this I have all the basic OBM 2.4 services running for e-mail with 
LDAP integration. As you probably guessed, my preferred language is 
English and I noticed a few mistakes and omissions in the 2.4 
translations. The first being the Logon button on the OBM home page!

I have a few questions, which I am hoping others on the list can assist 
me with:

1. Do you agree with my approach for getting 2.4 to install on Ubuntu Lucid?
2. Why did the daily builds stop on 31st March? They are stuck at rc2 
but I see from the releases page that rc5 is out and could well fix some 
of the bugs I noted above.
3. I have not had much luck getting Minig to work in this environment 
yet. Ideally I would use Roundcube as I am already familiar with this. 
Is there any pre-release documentation I could test to try and get this 
working?
4. How can I assist with translation work and help improve the English 
support in 2.4?
5. If I were to implement a new server, are the 2.4 release candidates 
the best way to go or should I use 2.3.x and then migrate when 2.4 is 
finally released?

Thanks for all your work on 2.4 so far. Hopefully I can assist in any 
way possible to making it a great release?

Regards,

-- 

Ian McMichael

• E-Mail: Ian.McMichael at gmail.com