The alfresco-community package recently landed in Canonical's Partner Archive for Ubuntu 9.10, thanks to Brian Thomason's packaging efforts.
Alfresco is an open source enterprise content management system that offers an integrated solution for many facets of the content management domain, similar to EMC's Documentum product.
I think you would be hard pressed to find an easier way of deploying Alfresco on a Linux platform than simply:
- Installing the Ubuntu 9.10 Server
- Adding the Canonical Partner Archive
sudo apt-add-repository 'deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu lucid partner'
sudo apt-get update - And installing alfresco-community
sudo apt-get install alfresco-community
Now doing something with Alfresco is perhaps a different challenge, if you're a Java-challenged Ubuntu sysadmin like me.
I'm happy to point you to an excellent article by Josh McJilton about Dashlets in Alfresco, which he developed at least in part on Ubuntu.
Give that a go, and let us know how the alfresco-community package on the Ubuntu Server is working out for you!
:-Dustin
I'm confused: if it's an open source CMS, why is it in the partner repository rather than in the main repository?
ReplyDeleteAlso, could add-apt-repository be used here, or is it just for PPAs? Sadly it appears to be undocumented.
Will this repo get updated to 3.3 on release? There are a lot of important changes to 3.3, so for anyone wanting to get started it would be a waste of time to start with 3.2. I recently documented installing Alfresco (3.2) on Ubuntu 9.04 and (3.3) on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (blog.mycroes.nl), so anyone should be able to get started with Alfresco.
ReplyDeleteRegards,
Michael
Why not put it in Debian? WTF is the "Partner Archive", a PPA??!
ReplyDeleteMichael-
ReplyDeleteThanks for the info, I'm not sure about the answer to your question. For that, I'll have to defer to Brian Thomason, who works more directly with Alfresco and their packaging and plans.
Brian?
:-Dustin
Marius-
ReplyDeleteYes, thanks, I have updated with a note to use apt-add-repository.
Marius/Anonymous-
ReplyDeleteYes, alfresco-community is open source. But it is in Canonica-Partner because of the way the package is maintained and supported.
The particular bits uploaded to this repository are specifically provided to Canonical by Alfresco. They have been through a certification cycle at Alfresco, as well as Canonical.
:-Dustin
Yet another question... This announcement is about the Karmic partner repository. While looking for people that did installations on Ubuntu and documented their experience, I noted a lot of people were using the partner repository from older Ubuntu versions to install Alfresco. Personally I feel that's the wrong approach, thus I did a manual install and tried to document it the best I could so others can also use it.
ReplyDeleteThe solution would of course be to make sure the partner repository gets proper attention and contains packages like Alfresco on release, which of course is an issue on its own (it took a while for Alfresco to reach Karmic). Moreso I think it's especially important that the partner repository is up-to-date for LTS releases.
Last but not least I was wondering about how extensions to Alfresco are handled. These are normally packaged as AMP file that can be integrated into the alfresco WAR, however it seems to me that this would pose an issue with updating Alfresco.
Anyway, I would be happy if you would be able to answer these questions, or get Brian to answer them, or can bring me in contact with Brian, because it's nice to see this cleared up...
I'm already planning the migration to Ubuntu Lucid for around 10 servers, but not having to worry about stuff like Alfresco would make it some easier.
Regards,
Michael
Michael-
ReplyDeleteI've asked Brian to come by here and answer your questions, but I'll answer one of them...
We will upload alfresco-community for Lucid once Alfresco is done with their testing/certification on Lucid (and after we've done a bit too). Hopefully that will be soon, or very shortly after 10.04's release. Stay tuned here, though. I'll post an article when that lands, if you like.
:-Dustin
I'll try to answer a few of the questions posted here if I can. Dustin alluded to it already, but the main reason this is in the Partner repository rather than in Debian/Universe/etc... is because Alfresco ships around 70 or so JARs bundled directly with their software. This wouldn't meet the standards of ours or Debian's official repos.
ReplyDeleteThe work involved to package up the JARs separately and/or use existing JARs that have already packaged was deemed to be too much of an effort, at least for now, by Alfresco. It would also add an additional QA process for them to handle.
No, the Partner repository is not a PPA. It is a Debian repository hosted by Canonical on archive.canonical.com and can be added in the way Dustin mentioned above, or via Software Center by selecting Software Sources from the menu.
As for having this package ready for the Lucid launch, it is certainly our intention, but that is contingent upon Alfresco giving us the go ahead. We are currently working with them to make sure it has passed all of their standard QA processes atop Lucid before we proceed.
At this point in time, I don't have an update as far as 3.3 is concerned.
If you have any further questions, feel free to contact me at brian.thomason -at- canononical -dot- com
This is fantastic! I am so glad to see the Alfresco package getting some love again. Hope it gets into Lucid real quick, I am happy to help/test with it.
ReplyDeleteAt present a bunch of the portlets in the share interface will be broken due to bug 304702, which is in the process of being fixed by bug 552426 which in turn kicked off bug 552613 and now needs a feature freeze exception. I will have a go with the new package for 9.10 later and confirm that it is still broken.
I just stumbled upon Alfresco being in the partner repository und your discussion about the 3.3 release.
ReplyDeleteIf you offer the 3.3 version in the partner repository wouldn't an 'apt-get upgrade' try to upgrade an existing 3.2 instance to a 3.3 instance? Until now I did not upgrade any Alfresco instance but from what I read in the wiki it might be quite complex to do this automatically. Maybe you should think about a way similar to the Virtualbox repository where you explicitly install "Virtualbox 3.2".
Yeah VirtualBox does an excellent job of maintaining their Ubuntu repo. It's just too bad they only have the PUEL edition and not the open source edition.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, since the Alfresco packaged had seemed to have been abandoned for a long time. I went ahead and figured out how to manually install the war on tomcat (it was a pain in the behind). I think I will continue with manually installing the war until Alfresco shows that they will maintain the package in the partner repo.
Wondering if anyone’s been able to upgrade/migrate from the Ubuntu 9.04 Alfresco 3.2 package version to 3.3 on Lucid Linux. I have a clean install 3.3 running perfectly on Ubuntu 10.04 but when I copy the database and repository files over from 3.2 following the upgrade documentation, I get the error:
ReplyDeleteERROR org.alfresco.repo.domain.schema.SchemaBootstrap] Schema auto-update failed
com.mysql.jdbc.exceptions.jdbc4.MySQLSyntaxErrorException: Table ‘alf_prop_class’ already exists
Anyone else come across this and have a solution?
Thanks,
Dave