ClearOS

"ClearOS Community is a cloud-connected Server, Network, and Gateway operating system designed for homes, hobbyists and Linux developers. ClearOS comes with a Marketplace full of easy to install apps and the solution is a snap to configure thanks to the intuitive web-based interface."

It is a central component of Tiki Suite and has a very large number of well integrated features to choose from: Mail & Webmail, LDAP, VPN & Firewall, etc.

{FLASH(type="youtube",youtube="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIBf9hE6hXQ")}{FLASH}

• ClearOS official site
• https://www.ohloh.net/p/clearos
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClearOS
• http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=clearos
• http://www.clearcenter.com/support/documentation/clearos_guides/start
• Join the Tiki/Tiki Suite group on the ClearOS site.
• How to install Tiki on ClearOS
  • Tiki on Clearos first experiments
• Creating A ClearOS Module
• http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/doityourself-it-guy/diy-replace-windows-small-business-server-with-clearos/398
• From CentOS to ClearOS
• https://github.com/clearos/app-tiki

PHP & MySQL & jQuery & jQuery Mobile like Tiki. And next version will use Bootstrap, like Tiki 😊

Benefits

• ClearOS self-updates by default. Once we add Tiki in the marketplace, we can work towards a self-updating Tiki (within LTS branches)
• ClearOS is available as a hardware appliance and thus, it will eventually become possible to purchase a Tiki-branded box, with self-updating Tiki, that can be installed on site or in a colo.
• ClearCenter offers many services, such as Domain names & DNS services, Remote backups, etc. in a unified interface.
  • Later, SSL certificates, phone numbers and SMS.
• Tiki is generally really good at things that can be done in PHP/MySQL/JavaScript on shared hosting. However, for some things, we need root server access, and concentrating on a reference implementation is the smart thing to do. As a community, we'll make sure it all works well together.
  • wkhtmltopdf for really nice PDFs
    • http://www.clearfoundation.com/docs/howtos/wkhtmltopdf
  • The various software to Search within files (Perhaps re-use some that Zarafa installs anyway)
  • ElasticSearch, for advanced searching and natural language processing features
  • Better interop with the OpenLDAP server
  • Better interop with the web server
    • Link checker All visits to Tiki error pages or Apache error pages should be available in a unified report (ex: top-10 errors your visitors are getting this week) so site admin can make redirect pages. See also Piwik
  • Better interop with the mail server
    • For example Forum and List Synchronization (but really with recent work on Mail-in and Notifications in Tiki 13, we should be really close to being able to do a real Mailing List in Tiki, with a cron job to check/send messages)
    • High-volume newsletters: Tiki newletters are fine for small & medium volumes, but they need to be improved for large volumes and the interop with ClearOS's mail server will permit things like: bounce handling, reduce chance of messages to be identified as SPAM, etc.
    • Things in Tiki like tracker items, pages, groups, file galleries, etc. could be assigned email addresses. Ex.: So take a picture on smartphone and email to be added to file gallery or tracker item. We can already do some of this, but it's manual process to set up.
  • Cron jobs and Batch processes
  • Improve TRIM and eventually add a nice GUI
  • Node.js apps such as Mozilla Together
  • Should be able to convert files if appropriate tools are available on the server
    • FFmpeg
  • Better security and performance
    • Antivirus
    • Memcached
    • httpd.conf
    • php.ini
    • Make sure SSL is OK as per https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=doc.tiki.org
    • IDS / IPS
      • While Intrusion prevention systems do exist in PHP (and we may add PHPIDS one day), they generally are done at the server level and we do run into interoperability challenges, such as False positives in ModSecurity
      • http://www.clearcenter.com/support/documentation/user_guide/intrusion_prevention
      • http://www.clearcenter.com/support/documentation/user_guide/intrusion_detection
    • WebDAV via SabreDAV will be added to Tiki in the future and server configuration is important: http://sabre.io/dav/webservers/
• ClearOS also has many benefits
  • Diversify community via Tiki's user & dev base:
    • http://info.tiki.org/article188-Tiki-reaches-500-contributors-with-commit-access
    • http://info.tiki.org/article192-Tiki-Passes-1-Million-Downloads
  • can access different web expertise and become more "webby" (Bootstrap, SEO, etc)
  • Tiki can serve as a reference implementation for any PHP app

Existing Apps

• Zarafa

Apps to create or improve

• Tiki
• Piwik
• Elasticsearch
• Syncthing
• XMPP -> Openfire Meetings
• Kimchi, WebVirtMgr or phpVirtualBox
• CronJob GUI
• FreeSWITCH & FusionPBX

http://www.clearfoundation.com/docs/developer/framework/tutorials/adding_clearos_apps_in_github
http://www.clearfoundation.com/docs/developer/framework/tutorials/hello_world

To do: test text based browsers in ClearOS to work with Syncthing, Kimchi and Tiki (and the ClearOS GUI)

Included projects

And many others:
http://www.clearfoundation.com/Foundation/integrated-code.html

Top feature requests /bug reports

• 0001358: Avoid writing to the file system if disk is nearly full.
• Easy CSR / SSL support

On radar

• MPEG-DASH on ClearOS

Long term

• We could see ClearOS for ARM processors

Related links

• http://www.smallbusinesscomputing.com/slideshows/the-5-best-linux-servers-for-small-business.html