Evergreen VMWare image available for download

After much iteration and minor bug-squashing in my configuration, I am pleased to announce the Evergreen on Gentoo VMWare image is available for download. The download itself is approximately 500MB as a zipped image; when you unzip the image, it will require approximately 6GB of disk space. (1)

Basic instructions for starting up Evergreen will be found in the Evergreen_Gentoo/README file inside the unzipped image. To use this image, you must have installed a VMWare product (2) on a machine somewhere. I've allocated 512 MB of RAM to the VMWare image, so the machine you run it on should have a total of at least 768 MB of RAM -- or you can try decreasing the amount of RAM dedicated to the VMWare image.

The image is based on the 1.1.x development branch of Evergreen from CVS as of April 23, 2007. There are a couple of bugs I have observed with the image so far:

• Checking out an item doesn't work. Fixed as of this morning - Bill Erickson noted on the open-ils-dev mailing list that the default circ rule wasn't being created by the install scripts and checked a fix into CVS. I spun a new image.
• The first time you start up the Evergreen processes with osrf_ctl, the OpenSRF-C process often dies with a segmentation fault. Restarting the processes then results in a stable running system. It's a race condition that we'll have to hunt down and eliminate.

Notes

1. I apologize for overestimating how much space the VMWare image would require way back at the beginning of this exercise. Apparently while VMWare Server offers an "expand disk" option, it does not offer a "shrink disk" option. One tip that helped me shrink the image from 1GB to half that size was to run "cat /dev/zero > zero.txt ; sync ; rm zero.txt" to zero out all of the bytes on the empty portion of the virtual disk before compressing the image.
2. VMWare Server and VMWare Player are both zero-dollar downloads from http://vmware.com/ - I use VMWare Server and don't know if VMWare Player offers any advantages over that.