JumpBox Official Blog

Seasons Greetings everyone,
In the spirit of the season, we are happy to offer you the newest addition to JumpBox Open.

Introducing the JumpBox for Gallery photo management.

Gallery is a web-based photo album organizer that helps you manage and integrate digital images with your website. Gallery allows you to create unlimited albums of your favorite photos and movies then store, manage, and share them easily.

Gallery enables collaboration and sharing with a unique feature set that includes RSS publishing, audience commenting, and email notifications. Gallery makes managing your digital images easy as well. For instance, Gallery allows you to save time when uploading your images by uploading materials via ZIP files or forms and can even retrieve web page images for your automatically given the web page URL.

Gallery provides photo manipulation features including automatic thumbnails, resizing, rotation, and flipping so you don’t have to use another application to do it beforehand.

Start managing your photos and movies in minutes with the JumpBox for Gallery.

The JumpBox for Gallery is available as a free download.  Grab one and try it out!

Also, we’ve got updated JumpBoxes!

JumpBox for phpBB 1.1.5
phpBB is an open source discussion forum system that integrates with your website. It’s a great tool for creating online discussion groups in organizations both large and small.

phpBB was upgraded to version 3.0.4, a release which includes minor bug fixes, security patches, and performance enhancements. (Release Notes)

JumpBox for vtiger CRM 1.1.3
vTiger is an open source web-based customer relationship management (CRM) system with features on par with applications like SugarCRM and Salesforce.com. For companies with multiple employees and multiple customers, customer relationship management system is a cornerstone of business success.

An upstream patch has been applied to fix a number of security vulnerabilities within the vTiger application however, the version of the vtiger application has not changed. (Release Notes)

JumpBox for MediaWiki 1.1.7
MediaWiki is a powerful open source wiki engine for web-based document collaboration. It’s a great tool that allows a team of collaborators to work together in creating and editing information. MediaWiki includes powerful wiki tools that allow you to create content using a simple plain text format that eliminates the need to write HTML code.

MediaWiki was updated to version 1.13.3. which fixes several critical security vulnerabilities. (Release Notes)

JumpBox for SugarCRM 5 1.1.8
SugarCRM is fantastic open source customer relationship management (CRM) system.

SugarCRM has been updated to version 5.1.0c, this release fixes a number of bugs. (Release Notes)

The JumpBox for SugarCRM 5 requires a special process to upgrade from earlier versions, find the release notes on the JumpBox for SugarCRM 5 upgrade process here.

JumpBox for Wordpress 1.1.8
Wordpress is one of the worlds most popular open source blog publishing applications. Create a blog and communicate directly with your audience online. Publish commentary, receive comments, share video and more with this blog publishing system.

Wordpress has been updated to Wordpress version 2.7 which adds a number of new features including: a redesigned interface, a new dashboard that you can arrange via drag and drop, QuickPress, comment threading, paging, and more. (Release Notes)

JumpBox for Drupal 6 1.1.7
Drupal is an open source content management system (CMS). It provides a simple, intuitive interface that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website without programming skills.

Drupal updated to Drupal 6.8 which fixes a number of bugs and some critical security issues. Updating is recommended for all users. (Release Notes)

JumpBox for Mantis 1.1.4
Mantis is an open source web-based bug tracking system with features including: time tracking, wiki integration, email notifications, RSS, a RESTful interface, Twitter integration, road map functionality and preset work flows.

Mantis has been updated to version 1.1.6, this release fixes caching issues, and some access permissions bugs. (Release Notes)

JumpBox for Drupal 5 1.1.9
Drupal is an open source content management system (CMS). It provides a simple, intuitive interface that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website without programming skills.

Drupal upgraded to version 5.14 which includes updates that solve critical security issues, incompatibility issues with some versions of PHP, and problems using the bug tracking system. (Release Notes)

JumpBox for Magento 1.1.2
Magento is an open source eCommerce application that allows merchants to build, create, and manage online storefronts. Magento’s customizable solution features tools for site management, marketing promotions, search engine optimization, and catalog management.

Magento has been updated to 1.1.8. A number of bugs have been fixed and new features have been added such as Google Website Optimizer and Google Base integration. (Release Notes)

JumpBox for Openfire 1.1.1
OpenFire is an open source real-time collaboration server based around the open Jabber XMPP protocol. It provides private and public instant messaging and group chat with support for any client that supports Jabber.

OpenFire has been updated to version 3.6.2. The update includes a number of bug fixes. (Release Notes)

JumpBox for Movable Type 1.1.6
Movable Type is an open source blogging platform which powers the websites and blogs of many of the world’s largest media companies, Fortune 100 businesses, and small and medium sized organizations.

Movable Type has been updated to Movable Type version 4.23. A number of changes have been made including enhancements to memory utilization, and database performance. New features giving designers and administrators greater control in optimizing the performance of their system have been added as well. (Release Notes)

JumpBox for Joomla!1.5 1.1.7
Joomla! is an award-winning Content Management System (CMS) that will help you build websites and other powerful online applications.

No updates have been made to the Joomla! 1.5 application however, the JumpBox for Joomla! 1.5 has been updated to remove the register icon from the admin portal.

Happy Holidays!

At the risk of having too much box in one title, here’s a 5min hi-def screencast that walks you through the steps involved in making a JumpBox work on Sun’s virtualization product VirtualBox.  This is a great win because it provides a free and open source solution for running JumpBoxes on an Intel Mac. The big disclaimer here is:

This is not an officially-supported virtualization technology of JumpBox at this time.

It will typically work (with occasional flakiness in grabbing an IP) but there are a few issues blocking our ability to officially support it.  We have it on good authority that these will be resolved in a future version so stay tuned for declaration of official support.  Here’s the tutorial:
*Note: click the  button in the lower-right of the player for a fullscreen hi-res version.

Setup is a fairly intuitive process with a few caveats to watch for. Namely these are:

1. If you’re hosting multiple JumpBoxes on the same machine you’ll have a list of disk images that all share the same name. The only way to tell which one to use when attaching disks to the VM is by hovering over the dropdown and looking at the path that appears in the tooltip.  
2. Make sure you add the disks before you start configuring the VM.  The last step of configuration is to attach the disks and it presumes you’ve already added them via the Media Manager. 
3. If you’re on an Intel Mac you’ll want to enable the VTX instructions for faster performance. Failing to do so will mean it runs about 8x slower than it should. 
4. If you want to run it in bridged ethernet mode you have to remember to explicitly tell it the network interface to use (Parallels and Fusion silently do this for you behind the scenes). 
5. You need to remember to add all the hard disks.  Typically JumpBoxes use two- root.vmdk and data.vmdk though some like Knowledge Tree will use three disks.  All must be added. 
6. Most apps will require only 256MB of RAM so it’s generally a good idea to pick this setting as the default. Some of the Java-based application JumpBoxes (typically the bigger filesize ones) will require 528 or even 1GB of RAM.  You can always change this setting after the fact so picking 256 to start is generally the preferred approach.

With a JumpBox you can deploy an application in 3 minutes but we’ve recently made it even easier.
Today we formally announced the release of all 38 JumpBox applications to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. This combination of JumpBox and EC2 signals a new era of agility and flexibility for virtualized organizations; server application deployment, configuration, and management without downloading any software, and almost completely independent of hardware.

Public Amazon Machine Images (AMI) for twelve JumpBox applications, including Ruby on Rails, Drupal, SugarCRM and more have been made available for free, AMIs for the full suite of 38 applications are available to Plus and Premium subscribers to JumpBox Open, our subscription suite of virtual appliances for getting things done.

Imagine: Enabling better customer service, software development, or content management almost instantly. EC2 provides cost effective, scalable computing power; JumpBox provides the application packaged for instant deployment.

Here’s what Jeff Barr, the Evangelist for Amazon Web Services had to say about JumpBox + EC2 in his post, JumpBox – Ready To Use Applications For EC2 on the AWS blog :

“..great for workgroups and web sites with modest amounts of traffic. They are perfect for trying out new applications and for getting off the ground in a big hurry. All in all, this is pretty powerful stuff. If you are putting a web startup together you can have your blog, bug tracker, project manager, wiki, and content management system up and running in the first hour of business.”

Pretty much sums it up. Now go kick some butt out there.
Steve

Here’s the official news release.

Hello,

If you need help managing your IT network’s growth and complexity, I’m glad to offer you a new tool to meet the challenge.

The JumpBox Open suite of award-winning applications now features the JumpBox for Zenoss IT Management.

The JumpBox for Zenoss enables network administrators to manage the configuration, health, and performance of networks, servers, applications and more. Monitor network devices, services, host resources, availability, and configuration with Zenoss, named by Infoworld as the best open source network monitoring solution of 2008 and now available as a simple to deploy JumpBox.

You can take the JumpBox for a spin with an instant trial right from your web browser and learn much more about Zenoss with a visit to their web site.

We hope you enjoy this latest addition to JumpBox Open and our continued focus on bringing you the best Open Source software available. There’s much more coming in the future.

Updated JumpBoxes

• JumpBox for Wordpress 1.1.7 (Download)

  Wordpress is one of the worlds most popular blog publishing applications. Create a blog and communicate directly with your audience online. Publish commentary, receive comments, share video and more with this blog publishing system.

  Updated to Wordpress 2.6.5 that fixes one security problem and a few other bugs. (Release notes)

• JumpBox for Redmine 1.1.1 (Download)

  Redmine is a project management and issue tracking system for software developers. Redmine provides many of the features in Trac plus support for multiple projects, role based access control, time tracking functionality, Gantt charts, a calendar view and user self-registration support. It includes tight integration with subversion and the JumpBox has everything you need already included so that you can hit the ground running.

  Fixes a minor bug in the backup system.

• JumpBox for PunBB 1.1.6 (Download)

  PunBB is a lightweight discussion forum that provides the essential features to host a thriving community without the tedious database, web server and application setup. It may have fewer bells and whistles than other forum applications but it has an intuitive user interface and renders XHTML-compliant output.

  Updated to PunBB 1.3.2 which fixes a XSS vulnerability. Also removed licensing to make it a FREE download. (Release notes)

• JumpBox for PmWiki 1.1.3 (Download)

  PmWiki is a wiki-based system for collaborative creation and maintenance of websites. PmWiki pages look and act like normal web pages, except they have an "Edit" link that makes it easy to modify existing pages and add new pages into the website, using basic editing rules.

  Removed licensing to make it a FREE download.

• JumpBox for MoinMoin 1.1.6 (Download)

  MoinMoin is an advanced, easy to use and extensible Wiki Engine with a large community of users. It’s written in Python and has a clean easy to understand user interface. Since it’s a Python program it’s not one of the most popular wikis, but that’s a shame as it has a very clean interface and is a very powerful tool for documentation projects. This makes the JumpBox for MoinMoin even more valuable, because it allows us to expose this great Wiki system to more users who we believe will find it quite valuable.

  Removed licensing to make it a FREE download.

• JumpBox for Joomla 1.0.x 1.1.3 (Download)

  Joomla! is an award-winning Content Management System (CMS) that will help you build websites and other powerful online applications.

  Removed licensing to make it a FREE download.

• JumpBox for SugarCRM 1.1.3 (Download)

  SugarCRM is the market-leading, commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) application. SugarCRM’s open source architecture easily adapts to any business environment by offering a more flexible, cost-effective alternative than proprietary applications.

  Removed licensing to make it a FREE download.

• JumpBox for TikiWiki 1.1.4 (Download)

  TikiWiki is your Groupware/Content Management System solution with a long list of features to help you build a compelling web based community.

  Removed licensing to make it a FREE download.

• JumpBox for silverstripe 1.1.3 (Download)

  Silverstripe is a standards-compliant content management system that allows the user to manage a dynamic content site. Silverstripe utilizes MVC architecture and has a desktop feel with its use of AJAX-based controls.

  Removed registration icon.

Thank you

The JumpBox Team