Gallery Appliance 1.1 and nice people

Back in August 2006 the Gallery team released version 1.0 of The Gallery Appliance and a new and improved version was released last Friday. The new release includes several improvements:

• 1. Updated Gallery 1 and Gallery 2 versions
  The new version includes Gallery 1.5.6 and Gallery 2.2.1
• 2. More Gallery 2 modules enabled, and Downloadable Plugins are also available.
• 3. SCSI emulation instead of IDE emulation makes it possible to run on VMWare ESX server.
  There is an VMware ESX image for those who want to run it on VI3.
• 4. rPath Appliance Platform (rAP) agent for remote appliance administration
  This is interesting. The people over at rPath has created a remote administration agent for appliances built on their rPath Builder service. It helps end users schedule backups, manage the appliance and makes updating to newer releases easier.
• 5. Increased number of build types.
  The appliance is now available in 9 build types, ranging from VMware and Microsoft VHD via Xen and Amazon e2 (ami-468c692f) to bootable cd based installs.

Now, where does the nice people come into it? Well, without the great help and drive from Valentyn Khokhlov and Michael K. Johnson of rPath this release would not have happened when it did. The first incarnation of the appliance was hacked together by Donald Webster, also known as fryfrog, and maintenance and upgrades were not first on the priority list. This time rPath approached us, asking if we were interested in updating the appliance now that new Gallery versions had been released. Of course we were interested, but lack of time and especially lack of rPath/Conary know-how limited us. Michael and Valentyn stepped up and pretty much rebuilt the whole appliance for us, while I kept the role as the nagging nitpick. Hopefully we'll be able to do the heavy lifting ourselves when we update the appliance next time, and I really hope we don't need to rely on the goodwill of others to get it done properly. Again, a big thank you goes out to rPath who helped us immensely this time around, they really did us a great favor! So far the appliance has been downloaded over 300 times since friday, and feedback is starting to make it's way back to us. If you have tested it, please provide any feedback you might have in the Gallery Appliance forums and leave a comment here as well. I'm very happy with this, and I hope we can make the next version even better.

Posted by Christian Mohn aka h0bbel