[TYPO3-50-general] Typo3 5.0 on a virtual disk image

[Alban Cousinié]

> Hi all,
> 1. Who will take care of this?
> I'm afraid I won't have time to do so, but I plan to do some inofficial
> PHP 6.0 packages for Debian/Ubuntu - ok, this is not that important as
> Robert and Karsten are "back-porting" T3 5.0 to PHP 5.2.

I can take care of this : I'm interested in this stuff and I have a fairly
good experience in linux webserver environment + typo3 setup. I haven't
installed typo3 5.0 yet so far, but it should be doable anyway. 

However I have little spare time at the moment so it may take me 15-30 days
to set up a good virtual disk image. 

I propose to use VMWare as :
1) VMware server and player are offered for free
2) Xen, though having the advantage of being open source, also has the
disadvantage of being able to run only on processors with virtualization
acceleration supported (Intel VT, AMD Pacifica), that is probably much less
than 50% off the installed CPU base.

The question is : which OS to use as Typo3 supporting OS ?
I have good experience with Fedora so this would be my first choice.
But many people have a preference for Ubuntu/Debian, which looks like a good
choice as well. Any whishes ? 


> 2. Who will host such a 500mb image ?
> I could offer a BitTorrent-Node with traffic of about 800 GB per month.
> But I think the image would be larger than 500 MB, calculate about 1 gig
> if you include an X11 environment etc.

I was thinking about a minimalistic server installation without graphic UI,
with SSH and FTP access to the typo3 virtual host. Most Linux web servers
are being maintained by command line only, and the true beauty of linux is
that you can do anything this way. Some have managed to shrink a full LAMP
webserver in less than 30 Megs with some special linux flavors like "Damn
Small Linux". With an Ubuntu distro, some are doing 170MB images. I'm not
sure I could go as low since I don't have those guys' virtual image building
experience, but we should probably be able to get well under 500 Mb.
Anyway a .torrent seems to be the best distribution method as it would save
our server's bandwidth, so your bittorent node offer is probably the best
way to go.


> It would be sad if the whole project is on single shoulders and die 
> after a first version.
>Yes, and I think there are quite a few VM and linux experts here who
>could perhaps do this... :)

Once the base image is good, one could easily :
- load the former virtual machine
- update with required new Linux packets using apt or yum
- Sync the Typo3 source using the SVN tool + repository connexion
pre-configured in the VM image
- save the live virtual machine and publish it


For now, I wouldn't mind managing the VM maintenance. However collaboration
is always welcome as there is always stuff to share and learn with others.
There will be some documentation work to do too.

Regards,

Alban Cousinié
http://www.mind2machine.com