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Requesting a Pentaho appliance

General

First, congratulations to the Turnkey Linux developers.  I installed the Drupal version yesterday - it was easy, and I was able to start using Drupal immediately.  Many, many thanks, and keep up the great work.

Might I a request for an appliance (recognizing, of course, that there are endless possibilities for new appliances):  Pentaho.  The Pentaho community has created a VM, but it was created with VMware Workstation 6, and so, isn't usable with VMware Server, e.g.  I think that lots of companies, large and small, Would benefit from a Business Intelligence program like Pentaho which works "out-of-the-box".  A "normal" install of Pentaho is a bit complicated, and can discourage it's use.  If I had the skill, I'd volunteer to do this but, alas, I don't

I hope the developers agree on the potential usefulness of a Pentaho VM.

Diggy.

Replies (7)

TurnKey PacketFence would require outside help

Reply 1
Thanks for the feedback. I'm not sure I understood you right. Are you suggesting we build a PacketFence appliance?

I took a look a cursory look at PacketFence, and a TurnKey PacketFence appliance is unlikely to happen in the short-medium term future because it's a complex piece of software with no native Debian or Ubuntu packaging support that looks to be difficult to integrate at the network level and requires a special testing environment which we don't have.

I'm also generally skeptical whether this type of software could be turned into an easy to use appliance, but I'd love to be proven wrong. If a domain expert put together a prototype TurnKey appliance (see community development section) that was simple enough to use, we could take another look.

Just a bit more

Reply 2

Thanks for the reply - most appreciated!

Again, I'm sure the development team could be overwhelmed with requests (especially when word really gets out about how well Turnkey VMs work), but I think Pentaho might be worthwhile.

In my first post, I mentioned that there's a Pentaho VM created with VMware Workstation 6. I was wrong; there is a Pentaho VM created by some VMware contributor, but unfortunately it doesn't work well, and the creator is unreachable. It was actually PacketFence that was created with Workstation 6 (and, thus, unusable by VMware Server users). Might I really push the envelope here and suggest that it's also worthy of the dev team's consideration.

I realize this foists the tough install/setup work on the dev team, but I think you'll probably see much wider adoption of these great tools because of it.

Excellent idea

Reply 3
Thanks for suggesting this. I wasn't previously aware of the Pentaho project. Looks very interesting. We are currently working on getting a handful of new appliances currently in development out the door, but after that when we are evaluating options for our next batch of appliances we will take this into consideration.

I've opened a Blueprint here, feel free to subscribe and receive status updates:

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/turnkeylinux/+spec/create-pentaho-appli...

Pentaho Appliance

Reply 4

Hi guys,

I was reading through the list of appliance proposals and I JUMPED when I saw a request for a Pentaho appliance.

I would definitely encourage this, because the idea of open source Business Intelligence is gaining traction.  Every business needs reporting systems, and in the current economy, companies will be unable or unwilling to pay large dollars for the current high-priced monolithic commercial BI solutions.

This could be another extension of one of your Tomcat appliances, or, this might even be a simpler appliance to build. 

The community edition of the bi-server comes with Tomcat and hsqldb embedded.  So maybe the appliance can be built by installing the pieces of the community edition on top of Turnkey core.

 

It's on our todo list, but we can always use more help

Reply 5
That sort of documentation is extremely helpful and makes it much more likely we'll get to Pentaho sooner rather than later. If anyone in the community is interested in helping further, putting together a tklpatch would be the way to go.

Hoping to eventually make time for Turnkey Pentaho

Reply 7

Just to keep the thread going, I'll mention that I hope to have some time to experiment with building a Turnkey Pentaho appliance.  Maybe during the summer...

In the meantime, via a LinkedIn thread, someone has built a VM with Pentaho 2.0, available at this site:

http://www.dataprix.com/blogs/bernabeu-dario/pentaho-20-imagen-virtual

(Google translator's version of the page via this link:

http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout...

)