Zimbra packages in Fedora

[Jonathan Steffan]

Jos Vos wrote:
> I'm a bit surprised this thread had so few reactions.  Zimbra is really
> a very useful piece of software and the "groupware" category of software
> is really missing from Fedora (and most other distros, AFAIK).

Zimbra is not distro friendly. It ships it's own versions of everything
and also requires selinux to be off and iptables to be off.

> 
> IIRC there are build instructions (don't remember if they provide a
> src.rpm or spec file, it's a while ago that I looked into it).

They don't provide srpms. Even their rpms need to be installed with
their install script. The rpms themselves assume very strange things
that would never be accepted into fedora in their current state.. and
this is just from watching the massive errors when installing without
their installer script (and with selinux enforcing.. now that was a
mess.. had to rebuild the server). I started to audit a policy for
Zimbra and it made me green in the face.

> 
> But: does it run without a non-free Java?

I'm not sure what java they build against, but tomcat is broken on
Centos 5 after *any* yum updates and some other strange issues. Maybe
bob can chime in with his findings, it pissed me off enough I stopped
working on it.

> 
> And: can for the bundled packages that you list above the standard Fedora
> versions be used instead?

I really wish they would release an "addon" package set that could be
integrated with existing distro maintained packages, but I highly doubt
this will ever happen. This being after I've studied their install
system and have had Zimbra in testing for a while.

Please don't get me wrong... +1 to Zimbra for putting together a cool
system, but don't expect to have a multipurpose machine after letting
zimbra have it's way with your bits. A derivative distro would be more
useful then what they have now :-/


-- 
Jonathan Steffan
daMaestro
Fedora Unity - http://fedoraunity.org/
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