Hi Alex, > What I was after please was a list of differences in the UI between > BlueQuartz and BlueOnyx.
Let me put it this way: Sadly the development of BlueQuartz stagnated sometime around 2007. When CentOS5 came out, it became apparent that there would be no BlueQuartz version for CentOS5 in the forseeable future either. Those facts eventually prodded us to create BlueOnyx as a fork off the BlueQuartz codebase. One of the first things we did was to incorporate all the updates and fixes into Blueonyx that we had submitted to the BlueQuartz SVN, but which hadn't yet been released. Those were plenty of fixes to sometimes longstanding problems - big and small. Next we then started to port the existing code from CentOS4 to CentOS5, which required us to make the GUI PHP-5.1 ready, which so far had been working only on PHP-4.3.9. When BlueOnyx was released in January 2009, it was basically "BlueQuartz on CentOS5" with some extras sprinkled in and since then it has continuously evolved further. The more visible aspects of the differences between BlueQuartz and BlueOnyx are of course the extra features such as: - built in phpMyAdmin - built in webmail - Brute Force Login detection and prevention mechanisms (pam_abl) - GUI to automatically create and remove MySQL users and databases for sites. - Subdomain management - Better PHP security management on a per site basis. - Optional suPHP support. - New skins for the GUI. - Working vacation messages. - Updated Dovecot and ProFTPd. - Ability to view logfiles, processes and logins through the GUI. - JSP support already built in with an improved GUI. - YUM updates are delivered through various mirrors right from the start. - Comes with PHP5 and MySQL5 preinstalled. - Zend Optimizer and IonCube support included. - GUI to modify SSHd settings (root access, port, protocols) - Mailman support instead of Majordomo. - "Site Prefix" that allows to prefix usernames with a 5 character string. - Better and more flexible "Web Alias" handling. The less visible things are a legion of small fixes all over the place. Such as to rip out and to throw away the old authentication mechanisms and to thoroughly switch BlueOnyx to shadow auth, a step which BlueQuartz had only done half the way. The next thing was to fix some long standing issues with CMU Migrations, which always had been a pain in the *** (excuse my French), where email aliases for sites got lost and mailboxes never migrated properly. Then the old dnsImport.pl was replaced with a set of scripts contained in "dns-toolbox", which greatly help with DNS migrations and modifications. So anything migration related (a common task for anyone who runs a BQ or BX server) now finally worked like it since long should have worked with a lot less hassles. Other less visible changes to the code made the GUI able to run seamlessly in an OpenVZ container to allow for that kind of virtualization, which can also make BlueOnyx ready to run in a clustered environment for those that need the extra relieability and resilence. Which was something that was often asked for, but had been impossible with a "stock" BlueQuartz due to the intricracies of the GUI and the architecture itself. All that helped to turn a hobbyist platform into something that was again ready for use in an enterprise environment. Recently BlueOnyx made another leap forward when we made it ready for CentOS6, Scientific Linux 6 and RHEL6. That required making the GUI PHP-5.3 ready, which in turn prompted us to incorporate a whole set of small improvements throughout the GUI and the backend. BlueOnyx also frequently releases updated ISO images and OS templates for easy installs, while the last inofficial BlueQuartz ISO created by NuOnce is now four years old and the only (more or less) supported method of installing BlueQuartz has ever been the TAR-ball install. CentOS4 will be EOL'ed sometime early 2012, which is not that far away. The BlueQuartz SVN shows that in the last two years some steps were made to make it CentOS5 and even CentOS6 ready, so there is some hope that it eventually may catch up again and that would be nice. But it has still a long way to go. Lastly: What makes BlueOnyx shine is the thriving community of users and developers. If you have an issue or find a problem, report it and it'll eventually get fixed and help is never that far away. -- With best regards Michael Stauber _______________________________________________ Blueonyx mailing list Blueonyx@mail.blueonyx.it http://mail.blueonyx.it/mailman/listinfo/blueonyx