eWEEK Labs Walk-Through: rPath

rPaths own Linux distribution, rPath Linux, is fairly vanilla—nothing to write home about, but a solid and up-to-date foundation for building Linux software appliances.

We downloaded a SugarCRM appliance in VMware format and booted it up on VMware Server. The console window directed us to the rPath appliance interface for a new SugarCRM instance.

The rPath appliance admin interface is brandable, but none of the appliances we tested took advantage of this option—nor did the appliances we tested use rPaths available suppport for managing software entitlements.

We began our short list of appliance setup tasks by changing the appliances default admin password.

We then moved on to setting up an e-mail server from which our appliance could notify us of updates and such.

Next, the rPath appliance interface showed us some basic details about the virtualized container in which it was running.

The SugarCRM appliance we tested defaulted to DHCP—we could change those default network settings here.

One of the strengths of the rPath appliance approach is that its set up to take care of system updates in the background. We could opt for sheduled automatic updates or to be notified when updates were available.

Before we knew it, our new appliance was configured and ready for a few final SugarCRM-specific configuration tasks.

With rPaths appliance interface, it took us less than 10 minutes to go from zero to a working SugarCRM installation.

Our Mediawiki installation ran just the same as our SugarCRM install had—the rPath/Mediawiki install was definitely the quickest and easiest route to getting a wiki up and running that wed ever experienced.