JumpBox Official Blog

Hello,

We are pleased to introduce the newest addition to JumpBox Open, the JumpBox for Magento eCommerce.

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. Winner of ‘08 awards from Infoworld magazine and SourceForge.net, Magento’s open source eCommerce platform is the most flexible eCommerce solution available today. Free from vendor lock in merchants can upgrade features quickly, and add specific functionality as needed. Magento helps you do eCommerce, the JumpBox for Magento helps you do it quickly and easily. With enhanced features like backup and restore, the JumpBox for Magento is the perfect eCommerce solution.

Build, create, and manage online storefronts - Magento is available to JumpBox Open subscribers immediately.

Magento features tools for site management, marketing
promotions, search engine optimization, catalog management, and more. Winner of ‘Best of 2008′ awards from Infoworld magazine and SourceForge.net, Magento is the most highly respected open source ecommerce solution available today.

Here are 3 cool sites from around the world built with Magento:

• Based in London, UKKO is a new luxury menswear brand for fashion conscious golfers both on and off the course. Fore!

• Famed table radio producer Tivoli Audio expands online in the Czech Republic with Magento.

• From the USA, NerdyShirts.com sells unique tee shirts for nerds. Our favorite? Mii Love.

Magento gives you ecommerce. The JumpBox for Magento helps you get started quickly and easily. Take the JumpBox for Magento for a spin and see for yourself!

Setting JumpBoxes Free

Over the past couple of weeks we’ve made a number of changes to the JumpBox web site and in the process made a nice selection of JumpBoxes available as FREE downloads. Currently there are 12 JumpBoxes available on the FREE Downloads page and we’ll be adding more as time goes by. The list of free JumpBoxes currently includes: Joomla 1.5, Movable Type, Moin Moin, TikiWiki, SugarCRM 4.5 and SilverStripe along with several more. Please check out the FREE downloads page for the current list.

Online Trials for Subscriber Only JumpBoxes

Another cool thing we’ve just introduced is a new online trial mechanism that allows anyone to try out the subscriber only JumpBoxes with nothing more than a web browser. Just look for the orange “Try this JumpBox” buttons on the site and you can get a one hour, full function trial of any JumpBox without having to download a thing. We think this feature is pretty cool, but it’s still somewhat experimental so if you try it out, please let us know what you think about it.

Why subscribers love JumpBox Open

If you haven’t subscribed to JumpBox Open, here’s what you’re missing:

• Fast, secure, agile solutions to your problems. JumpBox Open provides award winning applications that deploy in minutes. On top of that, Backup and Restore functionality keeps your data secure and gives you the flexibility to deploy to almost any environment.
• An investment that constantly gains value. JumpBox Open subscribers received an additional 15 applications this year at no added cost. Applications for Human Resource Management, Blogging, Project Management, and more.
• More for less - With growing
  budget constraints, reduced staffing, and less time available, the
  value of JumpBox Open has never been more clear. “Get more done for less.” Less time, less frustration, less cost. Subscribers automatically receive every new application and updated releases over their subscription.

Now is a great time to subscribe to JumpBox Open

Updated JumpBoxes

• JumpBox for Bugzilla 1.1.3 (More Info)

  Bugzilla is a web-based bug tracking system that allow individual or groups of developers to keep track of outstanding bugs in their product. Bugzilla competes with many commercial bug tracking systems and has many features its expensive counterparts lack.

  Updated to Bugzilla 3.0.6 which fixes some security issues. (Bugzilla release notes)

• JumpBox for LAMP Deployment 1.1.3 (More Info)

  The JumpBox for LAMP Deployment is a great utility system that allows you to easily deploy applications where a tailored JumpBox may not exist. It contains MySQL plus PHP, Perl, Ruby and Python along with PHPMyAdmin to help you manage the database. Using the JumpBox for LAMP Deployment you can easily deploy many popular PHP applications as well as CGI based Perl, Ruby and Python applications.

  Minor update. (Release notes)

• JumpBox for Moodle 1.1.5 (More Info)

  Moodle is a course management system that allows educators to create online learning communities for their students. It has an open design with a large developer community creating plugins, themes and modules. It’s used all over the world in environments large and small and is one of the better supported Open Source course management systems. The JumpBox for Moodle is a great way to get up to speed with Moodle and requires a minimal investment in time and money. It’s a production ready installation of Moodle and includes the JumpBox management tools and backup system to help make operations as simple as possible. If you’ve ever wanted to give Moodle a try, the JumpBox is the easiest way to do it.

  Fixed an issue with how Unicode was being handled in the database. (Release notes)

• JumpBox for PunBB 1.1.5 (More Info)

  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 which adds a number of enhancements. This JumpBox is also now a FREE download. (PunBB release notes)

“Setting up a blog has never been easier.”

Over a month ago, JumpBox launched the “Powered by JumpBox” service, which helps Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) grow sales by removing the friction associated with deploying server software.

Our Powered by JumpBox service transforms an ISV’s application into a JumpBox. (If you read this blog you probably know already that a JumpBox is a pre-built, pre-configured software application for virtual computing.) Short story: A JumpBox application deploys in less than three minutes, ease of deployment facilitates in-house trials by an ISV’s potential customer and motivates purchase.

We launched Powered by JumpBox by developing Virtual Movable Type for leading blogging software and services company Six Apart.  Using the Powered by JumpBox service, Six Apart allows potential customers of Movable Type to experience the power of Movable Type and realize its value in minutes.  Powered by JumpBox, Virtual Movable Type gave Six Apart a powerful sales tool that enables them to close sales quickly.

Though we knew this service would be a valuable tool for ISV’s, we’re still tickled, and darn proud of reviews like this.

Hi, I’m Austin Godber.  You may remember me from such JumpBox films as “The Amazing JumpBox Forums”, “JumpBox Support Squad”, and everyone’s favorite “JumpBox Platform Release Notes”.

I will be out in the world teaching a class this Friday, October 10th, at the Ohio Linux Fest University.  The classes are put on by the League of Professional System Administrators or LOPSA.  My topic of choice, of course virtualization related, is “An Introduction to Virtualization on Linux using KVM“:

This short course will provide an introduction to virtualization as well as discussion of the following topics:
* Overview of the state of virtualization on Linux.
* DIY virtualization options for Linux, concentrating on KVM.
* Innovations based on virtualization to keep your mind wandering through the rest of OLF.
This course is intended for those new to virtualization while some of the innovation material may be interesting to the not-so-new.

I will be around at the main event on Saturday the 11th as well.  Any one in the Columbus, Ohio area should come down and check it out.  The schedule is packed with all sorts of Linux goodness.

Hope to see you there!

Austin

We’ve been quite busy over the last few weeks and today everything finally comes together so I have a bunch of things to share.

JumpBox for Openfire

First there is a new addition to JumpBox Open, the JumpBox for OpenFire. OpenFire is a real-time collaboration server (better known as instant messaging) 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. It’s a really great system that we believe provides a nice addition to JumpBox Open. This release is available to all JumpBox Open subscribers and existing subscribers should have already received a download link and license keys. If you are a JumpBox Open subscriber and did not receive your key please contact us.

Powered by JumpBox

Next we’re very happy to be announcing a new service from JumpBox targeted at Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). This service is called “Powered by JumpBox” and allows ISVs to work with us on the creation of JumpBoxes for commercial applications. This allows us to share the expertise and quick to deploy experience we’ve developed for our Open Source based JumpBoxes with other developers and to bring greatly simplified deployment to their applications. This also brings more JumpBoxes into the world and while the applications won’t be part of JumpBox Open they will retain the common set of features that make up a JumpBox. This new service will also drive improvements to the JumpBox Platform that will find their way back into JumpBox Open.

Six Apart is the first customer for Powered by JumpBox

We’re also very excited to be announcing that Six Apart is the first customer for “Powered by JumpBox”. Over the past few months we’ve been working with them on simplifying the deployment of Movable Type and this has resulted in a number of exciting developments.

1. A new JumpBox for the commercial version of Movable Type. This is being released today under the name “Virtual Movable Type Pro by JumpBox” and is available directly from movabletype.com.
2. The current JumpBox for Movable Type Open Source is now available completely free through the JumpBox web site.
3. The JumpBox for Movable Type is now an official distribution format for the Open Source version of Movable Type as well as for Movable Type Pro.

If you’re not familiar with Six Apart and Movable Type, here’s the summary.

Movable Type is Six Apart’s flagship blog software product, launched in 2001. Today, this robust social publishing platform powers the websites and blogs of many of the world’s largest media companies, Fortune 100 businesses, small and medium sized businesses, and power bloggers. Movable Type is a fully integrated, scalable, proven social publishing platform upon which to build highly interactive websites, blogs and social networks.

JumpBox participates in VMware Ready program

And one final announcement, this week we also participated with VMware in the launch of the VMware Ready verification program for virtual appliances. This is of primary benefit to customers of Powered by JumpBox, but since all JumpBoxes share a common base any improvements we release will be inherited by everything in JumpBox Open. You can find out more about VMware Ready here.

Find me at VMworld and get a JumpBox T-Shirt

OK, just one more thing, this week I’m at VMworld in Las Vegas and will be wearing the new JumpBox t-shirt around. Steven debuted it on the blog earlier this week, but I’m carrying some extras with me so if you happen to be attending VMworld and see me walking around, feel free to stop me. I’d love to talk with some JumpBox users while I’m here.

Updated JumpBoxes

Wow, that’s quite a lot of news, no wonder we’re so exhausted, but there is more. We also have a bunch of JumpBox updates to share.

• JumpBox for Joomla 1.5.x 1.1.4 (Download)

  Joomla! is arguably the world’s most popular open source content management system for public facing web sites. Joomla 1.5 is a ground-up rework of the Joomla 1.0 code base moving it to a true MVC architecture.

  Updated to Joomla 1.5.7 which is a security release with a number of important fixes. (Joomla 1.5.x release notes)

• JumpBox for OTRS 1.1.3 (Download)

  OTRS is an Open source Ticket Request System (also well known as trouble ticket system) with many features to manage customer telephone calls and e-mails. The system is built to allow your support, sales, pre-sales, billing, internal IT, helpdesk, etc. department to react quickly to inbound inquiries.

  OTRS has been updated to 2.3.2. (OTRS release notes)

• JumpBox for Movable Type 1.1.3 (Download)

  Movable Type is Six Apart’s flagship blog software product, launched in 2001. Today, this robust social publishing platform powers the websites and blogs of many of the world’s largest media companies, Fortune 100 businesses, small and medium sized businesses, and power bloggers. Movable Type is a fully integrated, scalable, proven social publishing platform upon which to build highly interactive websites, blogs and social networks.

  Updated to Movable Type 4.21 and made free. (Movable Type Release)

• JumpBox for PunBB 1.1.3 (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 1.2.20 which fixes a cross site scripting security problem. (PunBB release notes)

We’re happy to introduce the ability to run JumpBoxes on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Amazon EC2 can be thought of as a big virtualization system in the internet cloud that you pay for by the hour. So instead of running a JumpBox on your hardware you use Amazon’s hardware and just pay for what you need. It’s a really interesting system for all kinds of different uses. I highly encourage reading more about EC2 and it capabilities and limitations.

One growing use for EC2 is as a very flexible hosting system. You can think of it as roughly equivalent to virtual private server hosting but with a number of key differences. First is that it’s much more flexible, you can launch as many instances as you want and you’re just billed by the hour for the time they’re actually running. The down side is that EC2 is a little more expensive than low end VPS services and you have to be very aware of how EC2 handles disks and to make sure you backup regularly (see the links above for more detail on this). Fortunately using a JumpBox makes this easy by allowing you to backup to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service.

Today we’re releasing four JumpBox AMIs as a beta test of our support for the Amazon EC2 system.

• JumpBox for MediaWiki - AMI: ami-71ab4f18
• JumpBox for Wordpress - AMI: ami-0eb45067
• JumpBox for Movable Type - AMI: ami-6aac4803
• JumpBox for Bugzilla - AMI: ami-70ab4f19

These are currently available as public AMIs on the Amazon system so if you have an Amazon EC2 account you should be able to launch them using any tool that can launch EC2 instances. If you don’t have an Amazon EC2 account you can easily signup for one using any Amazon account.

These public AMIs are just a test. When we roll out the full collection to EC2 it’s planned for the full set to be exclusive to JumpBox Open subscribers at the Plus level and above.

Important: In order to use a JumpBox AMI you must ensure that ports 22, 80 and 3000 are accessible. You may either add these ports to an existing EC2 Security Group or you may create a new security group to use when launching JumpBox instances. No other ports need to be made accessible in a default JumpBox.

The easiest way to launch EC2 instances is to use ElasticFox a Firefox extension for managing EC2 instances. If you use ElasticFox you can find the JumpBoxes in the list of available AMIs by sorting by manifest and looking for manifests that begin with jumpbox-amis/. From there you just have to setup your security group to allow the ports listed above and can launch as many JumpBox instances as you’d like. Just be aware that Amazon changed by the hour for every instance that you launch so make sure you don’t forget and leave something running that you didn’t intend to.

Hello,

We’re happy to announce the availability of six new JumpBoxes based on the JumpBox Platform 1.1. These are the first production releases made on this new and considerably improved platform. Here are just a few of the things that have changed with this platform revision.

1. The underlying operating system has been updated to Ubuntu Linux 8.04 LTS. This has brought a number of other updates to things like Apache, MySQL and other libraries used with the applications.
2. The backup system now supports Amazon S3, JumpBox to JumpBox and direct download as backup options. The addition of Amazon S3 is particularly nice as it gives you a really easy way to setup offsite backups.
3. There’s a new one click tool to turn on SSL encryption for the application.
4. A web stats package is now included by default and can be turned on with a single click.
5. There’s a new tool to help you configure the JumpBox to send email.
6. You can now put JumpBoxes into “maintenance mode” which allows you to keep users out of the application while working on administration tasks.
7. In general lots and lots of bug fixes, security improvements and a number of little niceties like friendlier 404 pages have been added.

We’ll be publishing much more information on this new platform in the coming weeks as we work on getting all the existing JumpBoxes updated.

Other News

• With these new releases, licenses are only available with a JumpBox Open Subscription.
• Three of the new JumpBoxes are exclusively available to JumpBox Open Subscribers. Existing Open subscribers will receive download links along with license keys within the next day or so.

New Production JumpBoxes

• JumpBox for Movable Type 1.1.0 (Download)Movable Type is a powerful, multi-user blogging platform. It’s widely used as a business blogging tool thanks to the ease with which you can create multiple blog sites. It has a large community and many add-ons available.
• JumpBox for Drupal 6.x 1.1.0 (Download)Drupal is an Open Source, web content management (WCM) system. 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. This JumpBox is for Drupal 6.x.
• JumpBox for SugarCRM 5.x 1.1.0 (Download)SugarCRM is a market leading 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. This JumpBox is for SugarCRM 5.x.

New Production JumpBoxes - Exclusively Available to JumpBox Open Subscribers

• JumpBox for Nagios 1.1.0 (Info)Nagios is an Open Source host, service and network monitoring system that will watch your network and alert you to problems before your clients or end-users do. The system runs checks on hosts and services that you specify using plugins that return status information to Nagios. When problems are encountered the system will send notifications to system administrators so that they can take action on the problem.
• JumpBox for MySQL 1.1.0 (Info)MySQL is probably the most widely used relational databases around. It’s used as an integral component in many JumpBoxes and is also useful to have available in an easy to use standalone version. This JumpBox includes MySQL 5 along with PHPMyAdmin setup and ready to run. It’s a great tool for developing database backed applications and can also be used along with other JumpBoxes if you need to move the database into a separate virtual machine.
• JumpBox for LAMP Deployment 1.1.0 (Info)The JumpBox for LAMP Deployment is a great utility system that allows you to easily deploy applications where a tailored JumpBox may not exist. It contains MySQL plus PHP, Perl, Ruby and Python along with PHPMyAdmin to help you manage the database. Using the JumpBox for LAMP Deployment you can easily deploy many popular PHP applications as well as CGI based Perl, Ruby and Python applications.

Thanks for supporting JumpBox and as always, feel free to send us feedback.

Kimbro Staken

JumpBox Inc.

We have two new beta JumpBoxes available in the Proving Grounds:

	Nagios is a network monitoring system that watches your network and notifies you of any problems. The JumpBox makes it really easy to get it running. Due to the nature of Nagios, configuration still requires additional work, but the JumpBox gives you a good jump start on the process.
	MySQL is the worlds most popular Open Source database. It’s a core component of many systems and the JumpBox for MySQL provides a very quick way to get a MySQL instance complete with PHPMyAdmin running.

Both are based on the JumpBox platform 1.1 Beta and include all the great new enhancements described here.

The other exciting news is that we’ve opened the Proving Grounds up to the public. You’ll notice there’s now a link at the upper right corner of this site which takes you to our testing community. The Proving Grounds is the place where we make pre-release JumpBoxes available for testing before moving them to production status. We’ve got a ton of interesting candidates in the pipeline so be sure to check out the Proving Grounds for the latest and greatest.

We have some exciting news today- you can now get a license for every JumpBox currently in our Open Source collection for just $199.99. With twenty applications in the collection today, this is a toolkit of incredible value. But this is also a gift that keeps on giving. JumpBox Open entitles you to a license for every new JumpBox we add to the collection over the next year. And we’re adding some great applications soon: Nagios, Moodle, Redmine, MySQL and a Ruby on Rails deployment JumpBox are all in the pipeline.

Think of it like this: if your time is worth $50/hr, a single JumpBox that saves you four hours today pays for the entire subscription. Then you have (Jeff Spicoli voice) “an ultimate set of tools” for the next year. Have a particular application you’d like to see added? Suggest it in the forums or via our contact form. We’re committed to making great Open Source applications more accessible and the debut of JumpBox Open should be a great step towards that goal. Keep in mind that the $199.99 pricing is introductory though so take advantage of it while it lasts.

We just launched the JumpBox Proving Grounds, our new private community for JumpBox users where you can get early access to beta and experimental JumpBoxes. Eight new beta JumpBoxes are currently available for free through the Proving Grounds, but you have to be a member to get them so request your invitation today.

We created the Proving Grounds so that we can more rapidly release new JumpBoxes and to give us a bit of a playground where we can release things that are more experimental in nature. This will allow us to release JumpBoxes for applications that look promising, but may not be quite mature enough that we’re prepared to support them as production quality.

Our goal is to place new JumpBoxes in the Proving Grounds for a month or so and then have them graduate to become fully supported members of the JumpBox family. A big part of being a member of the Proving Grounds is giving us feedback on what does and doesn’t work with these JumpBoxes.

Also, to celebrate the launch of the Proving Grounds we’re running a $29.99 special on Basic registrations for a limited time.

Here’s what’s available in the Proving Grounds today, and we have a number of other apps coming over the next few weeks.

The Alfresco Enterprise Document Management System  Learn about this project	Joomla Content Management System version 1.5  Learn about this project
OTRS Open source Ticket Request System  Learn about this project	Bugzilla bug tracking system  Learn about this project
Mantis bug tracking system  Learn about this project	Silverstripe Content Management System  Learn about this project
Project Pier project management software  Learn about this project	OpenLDAP LDAP directory software  Learn about this project

To become a member of the Proving Grounds you have to request an invitation, it’s open to all JumpBox users and once you’re in you gain the power to invite your friends.