We’ve built new 32 & 64bit Ruby Enterprise 1.8.7-2010.02 packages for Ubuntu Hardy and Lucid. The 2010.02 release of Ruby EE includes a number of backported fixes for critical bugs in Ruby 1.8.7p249 and we recommend users currently using our 2010.01 packages upgrade immediately.
For further information on using these packages see the release announcement for our Ruby EE 2010.01 packages.
Available from today, you can now choose either Ubuntu Hardy or Lucid as the base OS when building new Brightboxes.
Ubuntu Lucid is the latest Long Term Support (LTS) version of Ubuntu with security fixes provided until April 2015. It brings a whole bunch of upgrades such as Ruby 1.8.7, Monit 5, Apache 2.2.14 and new packages like CouchDB, Sphinx, Chef, RabbitMQ, MongoDB, ejabberd and many more.
We’ve treated it to the usual Brightbox Ruby deployment tune-up, including our Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.7-2010.01 packages. Updated Phusion Passenger packages are now available on our newly Lucid-enabled apt repository.
When buying a new Brightbox, you’ll see a combo box that you can use to select Lucid (Hardy is still currently the default). Upgrading from Hardy to Lucid isn’t really viable due to the way Hardy boxes handle kernels, so you’ll either need to request a re-image (which involves wiping your box, so make backups!) or buy a new box and move your apps to it.
We’ve built new 32bit and 64bit Ruby Enterprise 1.8.7-2010.01 packages for Ubuntu Hardy and Lucid. The new packages are now the default on new Lucid beta boxes. For Hardy, as before these packages are quite a major change from the default Hardy Ruby interpreter,which is 1.8.6, so we recommend you test thoroughly before putting it into production.
As with our other Ruby EE packages, they upgrade (i.e replace) the standard 1.8 Ruby installation. This means all your gems stay the same, and everything on your system immediately starts using them (Phusion’s own Ubuntu packages do not work like this).
These packages are also the best way to get Ruby 1.8.7 on Hardy, which you’ll need if you’re playing with Rails 3.
If you’re on a Hardy based Brightbox, just create or edit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brightbox-rubyee.list to contain the rubyee-testing component like so:
deb http://apt.brightbox.net/ hardy rubyee-testingIf you’re on one of our Lucid beta boxes provisioned before today, simply create /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brightbox-rubyee.list and add the rubyee component:
deb http://apt.brightbox.net/ lucid rubyeeFinally, update and upgrade libruby1.8:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libruby1.8 irb1.8 libopenssl-ruby1.8 libreadline-ruby1.8 rdoc1.8 ruby1.8
If you’re not on a Brightbox, see the instructions on our wiki first. The wiki also documents how to revert back to the old packages.
You may have thought the time is wrong on your server. Well, it isn’t really, it is just that we prefer to set the default time on Brightboxes to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
This is generally considered to be best practice where ever a server is geographically located, however, it may cause a problem if you are hosting a geographically specific web application.
If your web application requires a different time-zone such as CET, BST or PST, or Daylight Saving Time is giving you a headache, take a look at our Wiki page for a timely introduction to the subject of time-zones on Brightboxes.
Phusion released Passenger 2.2.10 this week, fixing some bundler compatibility bugs and a file descriptor bug that could lead to “mysterious crashes”.
We’ve built our Ubuntu Hardy packages for i386 and AMD64 architectures which are now available from the Brightbox apt repository. We’ve also upgraded our librack-ruby packages to 1.1.0.
The Phusion team released Passenger 2.2.9 today, which adds support for Rails 3, the GEM bundler, and fixes a couple of bugs. As usual Brightbox are providing Ubuntu Hardy packages for i386 and AMD64 architectures, available now from the Brightbox apt repository.
This package won’t actually support Rails 3 just yet though as we’ve yet to package and test the librack 1.1.0, which Rails 3 depends on. We’re working on it now and once we’re happy with it we’ll add new packages to our repository as usual.
We’ve just added Caspar Clemens Mierau’s package for the Apache x-sendfile module to our Ubuntu Hardy package repositories, so now it’s trivially easy for Brightbox customers to start using it. We’ve also built an AMD64 version too. Just install the package, enable it and reload Apache:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-xsendfile
sudo a2enmod xsendfile
sudo invoke-rc.d apache reloadWe’ve built 32bit and 64bit Ubuntu Hardy packages for Ruby Enterprise 1.8.7-2009.10. These packages are still in beta, and this is quite a major change from the default Hardy Ruby interpreter,which is 1.8.6, so we recommend you test thoroughly before putting it into production. We’ve been using them for a couple of days with no problems though.
As with our other Ruby EE packages, they upgrade (i.e replace) the standard 1.8 Ruby installation. This means all your gems stay the same, and everything on your system immediately starts using them (Phusion’s own Ubuntu packages do not work like this). We’ve tested it with the usual Railsy native gems, RMagick, Mongrel, fasthread etc. and have had no problems.
If you’re on a Brightbox, just edit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brightbox-rubyee.list and change the rubyee component to rubyee-testing:
deb http://apt.brightbox.net/ hardy rubyee-testing
Then update and upgrade:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libruby1.8
If you’re not on a Brightbox, see the instructions on our wiki first. The wiki also documents how to revert back to the old packages.
As said above, we now have 64bit packages available too (which was recently made easier by some Debian package dependency updates, also included in our repository).
Please let us know how they worked out for you on our forum. Thanks!
For my weeks on call, Brightbox let me choose an ultra-mobile (netbook) PC. This will allow me to leave the house without having to carry a heavy full-size laptop with me.
I wanted one that worked well with Linux, preferably Ubuntu Netbook Remix, had SSD rather than hard disk, and built-in 3G connectivity.
I’ve picked the Acer Aspire One (AAO) A110. It was available in the UK from Tesco in this spec with 1GB of RAM for GBP 179 – a bargain.
It came with a truly dreadful pre-installed build of Windows XP Home. Very slow and very much not recommended. Ubuntu Netbook Remix is, on the other hand, superb.
I’ve installed the pre-release Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic”. Here’s what I’ve found that’s specific to the A110. I’ve written up these notes in the hope that they’ll be useful to someone else thinking of running Linux on an AAO. While there is a wealth of information about it out on the Internet, it’s not all collected together in one place.
Read the rest of this entry »
Passenger 2.2.4 was released last week and we now have Ubuntu Hardy packages available in our repository.
Passenger 2.2.4 actually is just a small bug fix release for a memory leak in 2.2.3, but obviously brings all the benefits of 2.2.3 too. A huge number of bugs have been fixed, particularly the “Broken Pipe” errors some sites under heavy loads were experiencing.
As usual, details on installing the packages from our repository are available on our wiki.
If you’re using Passenger and it’s making you happy, please do consider supporting its development by donating money in the form of an “Enterprise License” direct from Phusion, the company behind it.
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