One reason I'm playing around with VMWare Player is to try out SocialText in a virtual machine to play around with it instead of ruining a perfectly good machine+Perl installation by the bazillion prerequisites it has.
First, I tried the installation on Debian Sarge (3.1r3) via CPAN - that just didn't work. SOAP::Lite fails its tests for some dark reason. Without a local CPAN mirror, the installation will take ages.
Next try was on Debian Sarge using the Debian-provided packages - this didn't work, because Debian doesn't provide the recent enough versions.
Next try was on Debian Etch, the testing release that is soon to become the stable release of Debian. After adding the Socialtext repository to the list of repositories to hit, the only minor snag was that SOAP::Lite needed to be force-installed, as it failed its tests without indication as to why (Apache::Constants::OK wasn't autoloaded in the tests, but why?). Test::Base needed to be installed afterwards manually. The Socialtext package didn't make test for me, but maybe that was because I didn't have apache-perl installed but only apache. After installing the apache-perl package and fiddling around with PostgreSQL, it all now seems to work and has been compressed into a clean, 400MB virtual machine image.
The Perl script I used to automate the installation onto the Debian VM currently lives at http://datenzoo.de/pub/install-opentext.txt. I'd also publish the VMWare image, but it's 400MB and I don't have that kind of bandwidth...
So, hints as how to reduce the size of a VMWare image (like recipes for using dd to make a harddisk image more compressible) are welcome.
Socialtext itself looks quite slick once it's running - but it needs a lot of RAM too, as the kernel killed some tasks with 256MB RAM available to it when the page update daemon was running and the machine load went up to 16. But it has a wiki, a blog and commentary features - so all that's missing is a mailing list and chat and you have your closed usergroup forum :).
