New beta installer available: eBox Platform 1.5-1

The development team of eBox Platform, the Linux small business server, is glad to announce that you can now download a new installer CD for the eBox Platform 1.5 series. Please note that eBox Platform 1.5-1 is a development version based on Ubuntu 10.04 and it will become eBox Platform 2.0 (next stable release) after a stabilization period.

As to the improvements, the most relevant changes on this new 1.5-1 installer are focused on improving the performance:

The old configuration backend (gconf) is now replaced with a brand new one based in redis. This improves the user experience in general, making the web interface more responsive. It also decreases the installation and boot times.

The migration scripts of each package are now run on the same perl interpreter. This reduces the installation time of the packages.

We believe that this is an important change and we would be glad to have your feedback to check that everything is right. There shouldn’t be any problems on a fresh install, but if you upgrade from an older version with the configuration stored in gconf there may be issues in the migration process.

In addition, the 1.5-1 installer includes new versions of the following modules: Users, DHCP, Backup, Groupware, Firewall, IDS, Monitor, NTP, Software Management, HTTP Proxy and Webserver. These can be also updated via the Software Management module if you already have a installed 1.5 system.

Please remember that the 1.5 versions are beta and not intended for production environments. However, your feedback is very important to make eBox Platform 2.0 a great release! Please do not hesitate to report any issues through the eBox Support Forum or eBox Trac.