Untangle, Asterisk PBX and File Server; All-in-One. Part 3

In this third instalment, the hardware is all running and I have a nice and shiny new LFS-6.3 running happily with xorg-7.2 and the very cool and lightweight fluxbox Window Manager. I have also installed the latest JDK, and Ruby & Rake to support the untangle build process.

A first try at building the untangle source failed (as I expected really). Initially this was due to the JAVA_HOME environment variable being hard-coded into various “.rb” rake build files. Needless to say, where they expected the JDK to be (/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun/jre), mine is somewhere else entirely (/opt/jdk).

I edited the top level rakefile, so that JAVA_HOME pointed to my JDK, to see how this affected the build. It ran for a bit longer but then aborted with some unintelligible errors.

Realising that I know nothing of Ruby, and consequently Rake, I thought I’d try a different tack. My main desktop machine runs Ubuntu Feisty. As an experiment, I installed VirtualBox (A virtualisation application) and installed the Untangle ISO into that as a virtual machine.

Really neat – it worked without any hiccups or issues whatsoever. Now I can play around with Untangle, see what goes where and what it’s dependencies are, before I go back to try and build it from source on my new server platform.

Here’s a screen shot of Untangle running as a VM (Virtual Machine) on my Ubuntu Desktop 🙂 You can see I have opened a

Untangle in VirtualBox

terminal in Untangle so I can start investigating the environment.

In terms of the dependencies I know I am missing: Postgresql is definate, and I may need ANT too. It might also be that I will need to downgrade the JDK to version 5 rather than 6; but I’ll confirm that later.

I have also just ordered the FXO card for Asterisk. The card I ended up going for was for sale on eBay in the USA. It sounds like it should do the trick nicely and has a low profile bracket so it will install into my little case. Including shipping it worked out at just over £17.00. Not too bad.

This may end up being a slightly longer series that I first thought. But hopefully it will still be interesting…

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5 Comments

  • Andrew Fife says:

    Alan:
    this is great stuff, you are the man!
    -Andrew

  • Scott says:

    Alan,

    I am also trying to setup Untangle on my Ubuntu 7.10 using VirtualBox. Can you provide your settings for your VM? I start the install, but it gets to Please Wait screen and after several minutes it goes black and then no further (in the VM).

    Untangle 5.03.iso

    I have:
    Base, 512MB
    Video, 128MB
    HD, 20GB
    CD ROM
    3 NIC’s, all NAT

    I would appreciate any tips.

    Regards,
    Scott.

  • Alan Lord says:

    Hi Scott,

    When I ran it up in a VirtualBox VM, I don’t recall doing much other than creating a new VM and pointing it at the iso for Untangle.

    I’ve moved to a new partition/fresh install of Ubuntu Gustsy and haven’t got around to re-installing VBox or UT yet. To be honest, I need to wait for their 5.1 release (or a beta thereof) before I can go any further with it.

    Sorry I can’t help you much, but I don’t remember having any problems getting it to install and then start-up at all. I only had two NICs on my setup but I can’t remember how much RAM.disk space I allocated…

    Alan

  • Abhit Nigam says:

    Hello all …
    as i have tried all the possible ways to build untangle on my ubuntu platform but can’t get success as it shows rake aborted problem at the time of fire ‘rake’ command.

    According to u, as u all were using VM-Ware which is an sw whose work to just show other OS also with current one virtually. as v all know tht Untangle can act as an software and Operating System also ..thn it would b install as an OS on VM-Ware sw…which v don’t needed.

    again my task is how to build this to make some changes on tht.

  • Alan Lord says:

    @Abhit,

    The last time I looked at UT, it is available to install directly on Ubuntu using a shell script. They package it using apt so it is pretty straight forward. Check out their developer’s wiki or forum but I’m pretty sure this is the case.

    HTH

    Alan

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