The Geeky Junkyard of kingler

The combination of rPath Builder and VMWare Player is a perfect tool for quick web development and distribution, and a quick way to play with Linux right on your desktop.

When trying to build the Ultimate WordPress MU (MultiUser) Appliance, I started to learn rBuilder Online, which I found is not as newbie-friendly as it should be. Thus I wrote this post to record my learning and hopefully it will be shorten your learning time.

The purpose of this tutorial is to get you started in setting up a rBuilder Online project. and use a local rPath Virtual Machine to checkout, test, build and commit your own packages to rBuilder Online. In the end, you will be able to create a virtual machine disk image online, containing your customized Linux.

If you just want to use pre-built packages and organize them into a customized Linux, you can simply use the web interface in rBuilder Online. But if you need to build your own package, please follow the guide here.

To start, you will need at least VMWare Player or VMWare Server (Fusion if you are using Intel Macs) installed on your machine. Make sure you have at least 512MB of physical memory, because the Linux Virtual Machine needs some of your physical memory.Once you have set up your Virtualization environment, download the rPath Linux VMWare Player image. Go to the rPath Linux project website, find a release (currently 1.0.5) and download the VMWare Player image.

While you are downloading the file, get yourself a free account on rPath Builder Online and create a new project. However, please note that the projects hosted on rBuilder Online would be open-source, which means if you want to keep your code secret, you will need to set up your own rBuilder environment. I don’t know how to do yet, but be sure to check out the wiki, though.

All ready! I guess you already got the downloaded zip file for rPath Linux. Unzip it to a folder and use VMWare Player/Server to open the .vmx file. Boot up the Virtual Machine. You will be soon welcomed by a graphical interface from rPath Linux.

Use username: root and empty password to log in.

Open up a text terminal (upper-left corner: Application -> System Tools -> Terminal)

type in the following commands to update the software and install the rmake building tool:

conary updateall
conary update rmake --resolve
service rmake on


Now, the system is almost ready for building packages. But we need to make some new packages. I am not going to the details here because you can follow the easy tutorial in the wiki. Note, you cannot cook new packages using root user, so you will need to create yourself a new user in the system.

After finding the right recipe for your application and cooking it for a test, you are about ready to build it into a trove.

Take a quick look at the workflow for rMake. For a simple package, you can just do this:

rmake build wpmu.recipe

Finally, commit your build into the rBuilder Online repository. Replace the number 1 with any job number you see when you use rmake to build your recipe.

rmake commit 1

Now, you can simply go to rBuilder Online and use the web interface to add your package to a group and cook it.

After cooking the group, you can make a build based on it, and download the disk image with your own customizations! Have fun!

Visit here for details.

A screenshot of the main index page for the Virtual Appliance.

Tomorrow will be the first day of the Year of the Boar. Wish everyone a wonderful and fruitful year ahead!

Image credit: The Boar Year 2007 by ~ysanau on deviantART

Although my site doesn’t really get much traffic, I tried to improve the site response.

The best way I found was to cache your site using the WP-Cache-2 Plugin by Ricardo Galli.

For a blog site, most contents usually won’t change very often. Even if you are really energetic and passionate, one post a day would be probably the most you can do.
However, the comments on your post can change much more frequently. If you set the cache to expire in 1 hour, new post or new comments in that hour would not show up because the old cache is still there. I guess this is still a bug for the plugin, but should be able to get fixed.

Other than the bug, the caching solution worked very well. I used Apache Benchmark (ab) tool to test the speed before and after enabling the caching plugin. The speed boost is almost 4 times with caching (from 800ms/request to 200ms/request)!

If you can bear with the cache expiration bug, this plugin is highly recommended for a busy WP site!