Well, loathe though I am to lose the normal linux evangelicalism we like here at “Why Dont You,” but after a nightlong drama at the hands of SuSE10.1, my revolutionary fervour towards Linux is somewhat deflated.

Basically, I spent last night trying to install and configure Macromedia Coldfusion MX 7, under Apache 2.0.54 on SuSE. Should have been easy. On windows it was geniuinely the work of about ten clicks and ten minutes of my life. The linux experience was vastly different.

Overall, after four hours, I still dont have cold fusion up and running on linux. This is madness. It is a server operating system and should find running services like this as easy as displaying a window.

The background. I have a fully running, default, installation of Apache and I downloaded the .bin version of CF MX7 from the Macromedia website. I burned this to disk and got ready to install. As part of the general housekeeping I got rid of all the excess files and ensured there was about 7GB of free space on / (and 1.8GB on /home). All well and good.

Next, the bin file was copied to /tmp so it could be run from the HDD (faster and more reliable than running from CD), and I switched to root to start the install. Install was from the command line in a gnome terminal.

Then everything went down hill. After what seemed an eternity of questions and configuration options, accepting the defaults, everything appeard to be working. I closed the window and tried to connect to local host.

Nothing.

I tried all manner of combinations, different strings and the like. Still nothing. Despite the apache processes running, there is no way on Earth it would let me open localhost. In the end, I cracked, uninstalled ColdFusion and by magic Apache worked again. Sadly, even now, I have no idea what the fault was.

Next time, I paid a bit more attention to the messages and questions. It turns out that SuSE are far from standard in the location of its server binaries and appears (on my system at least) to have three locations for the supposed Apache executable file. SuSE seemed to want to run a file called apache2 (which lives in rc.d), yet despite this identifing it self as “Apache 2.0.54,” ColdFusion refused as it had to be version 2.0.46 or higher. (Madness…) Eventually I found some versions of Apache living under /etc/ calling themselves httpd2. When I pointed CF at these, it was more than happy and the installation went fine.

When all was finished, I edited the required config files (SuSE has its own way of using the httpd.conf file to load modules. It is insane) and tried to start the httpd2 server executable. It appeared like things had worked. YaST wasn’t overly happy and this is not a trivial thing to do. YaST seems to want you to use apache2 and nothing else. Eventually, everything seemed to be running and I braved Cold Fusion.

This is where the problems really started. Numerous error messages scrolled past the console window at light speed. Sometimes making sense, sometimes implying things were working, other times warning of dire problems. In the process of trying to correct the problems I tried to FTP a config file from an different machine, only to discover I had no diskspace remaining on /home.

1.8GB gone in about 3 minutes. Frantically I started deleting files from the Cache and temporary files. Each time, df would report some diskspace returned, only for it to vanish a second later. Nothing I did either found the source of the lost space (piped the output of ls to a file on /root, searched, no large files found) or managed to recover any. A shutdown, followed by a reboot restored a working system (with the 1.8GB /home restored to normal) but ColdFusion was a total non-starter.

This is compared to the effort involved on Windows. Less than a dozen mouse clicks, two passwords and there it was. A working WAMP plus ColdFusion MX 7 system. What is the world coming to…?