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1. General and Features

1.1 General

Why is VishwaKarma free?

We believe that software must not be hoarded by individuals or corporations, but instead be made available to everyone who needs it. That way people can benefit from others' work without having to reinvent the wheel each time they need a problem solved.

We use the GNU Manifesto as our guiding principle when writing software.

We release our software under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

We make our money from our consulting services. If you like our software, may we suggest that you consider us for your next project as a way of saying thanks?

Why write another web-hosting control panel when so many are already available?

Short answer: because we can!

Long answer: VishwaKarma has some features which no other control panel has to the best of our knowledge:

Please let us know if you are aware of any software having these features.

What other free (Linux/Unix-based) control panels are available for web-hosting companies?

We are aware of the following:

Please let us know of any other free web-hosting control panels.

What other non-free (Linux/Unix-based) control panels are available for web-hosting companies?

We are aware of the following:

Please let us know of any other non-free web-hosting control panels.

Thanks to Tim Jung for links.

What language is VishwaKarma written in?

Perl 5.005. We like Perl :-)

Will VishwaKarma run on Redhat 7.x? How about Debian? Mandrake? Corel? ...?

Probably, though you will have to change the locations of some system files and programs. We've tried to parametrise them as far as possible in Server.config, but there may be a couple of dependencies in the code too.

Red Hat 7.x is now supported as of VishwaKarma 2.0-Beta8.

Can I add features to VishwaKarma?

Yes. The code is commented (though sparsely) and we've tried to comment all large blocks by specifying what is being done there. It's up to you to figure out how it's being done :-)

Is there a demo of VishwaKarma available on the 'net?

Sorry, we are not aware of any server which has a demo of VishwaKarma. Why don't you put one up on your server?

Can I see some screen shots of VishwaKarma in action?

Jason Klein has kindly put up screen shots of VishwaKarma at http://www.datility.net/pages/other/vkshots/.

The install process looks very complex. Can someone install VishwaKarma for me?

Kandalaya has lots of experience in installing and configuring VishwaKarma :-) However, we survive on consultancy revenue, and charge a fee for VishwaKarma installation. Please contact us if you would like us to install it for you.

You should also contact us if you'd like to be included in a list of organisations who support VishwaKarma, for a fee or for free. This list is currently empty.

Is there a mailing list for VishwaKarma?

Yes, there are two mailing lists:

vk

The VishwaKarma discussion list. You can ask VishwaKarma-related queries here. To subscribe, send a message with the subject subscribe <your-email-address> to vk-request@kandalaya.org.

vk-announce

An announce-only list. To subscribe, send a message with the subject subscribe <your-email-address> to vk-announce-request@kandalaya.org.

1.2 Server features

How many domains does VishwaKarma support?

Virtually unlimited. You are only limited by the underlying operating system, memory, disk and bandwidth.

Do I need one IP address per domain?

No, you need just 2 IP addresses to run VishwaKarma: 1 primary server IP (for administration) and 1 for domains. You can run all your domains on the second IP. Of course, you can use as many more IP's as you like!

Will VishwaKarma work with <insert name of favourite mail server software here>?

Currently VishwaKarma only supports Sendmail. However, it's possible that we may support other mailers in the future; we hope that the user community sends in patches for their favourite mailers.

Will VishwaKarma run under mod_perl?

Probably. we've tested it on our own computers with mod_perl and not faced any problems. However, we want to make sure that VishwaKarma will run as stand-alone CGI scripts since using mod_perl requires a recompilation of the stock Apache which comes with Redhat (you did know that mod_perl doesn't run well as a module, didn't you?)

What support packages does VishwaKarma need?

Required packages:

Recommended packages:


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